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Translation amusement

Shakespeare

Suppose that you found a translation service in Gemini space, and you fed in some quotes from Shakespeare, asked for them in Chinese, and then translated them back again. What would it produce? Or perhaps the question is "Can machine translation write like Shakespeare?"

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

Jane Austen

Let's try the first sentence from Pride and Prejudice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

A. A. Milne

Winnie-the-Pooh defeats machine translation:

The more it snows (tiddely pom), the more it goes (tiddely pom), the more it goes (tiddely pom) on snowing.

Disclaimer

Translation of natural language is difficult, and I don't want to have a pop at the people who did it. It's kind of amazing that it works at all. But it's also amusing when it doesn't quite work.

Versions that use "libre" instead of "google"

There's a choice of translation engine, so I used the non-google one, but it seems to have stopped working. Here's some old links in case it gets fixed.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

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