examples of translation feedback

June 27, 2010 11:35 PM

a common internet game, feed text to a translation engine and back. recursively. get funky results. i vaguely remember someone using "all is far in love and war" from Russian to English for this game. is there and online script for this?
posted by yosh to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

http://translationparty.com/

http://pythontranslationparty.appspot.com/ seems to work better at the moment
posted by shii at 11:46 PM on June 27, 2010

Best answer: Perl. Something like this untested script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $text = 'all is far in love and war'; 
my $from = 'en'; 
my $to   = 'ru';
my $it   = 10; 

use Lingua::Translate;
Lingua::Translate::config
    (
        back_end => 'Google',
        api_key  => 'YoUrApIkEy',
        referer  => 'http://your.domain.tld/yourdir/',
        format   => 'text',
        userip   => '192.168.1.1',
    );
foreach(1..$it){ 
	my $xl8r  = Lingua::Translate->new( src => $from, dest => $to );
	my $xl8r2 = Lingua::Translate->new( src => $to,   dest => $from );
	$text = $xl8r2->translate($xl8r->translate($text)); 
}
print $text . "\n"; 

Sure you can make this into a one-liner :)
posted by alex_skazat at 12:13 AM on June 28, 2010

Philip K. Dick mentioned this game in 'Galactic Pot Healer'.
posted by ovvl at 4:24 AM on June 28, 2010

translationparty.com might be what you're looking for -- as mentioned previously on metafilter
posted by tractorfeed at 5:52 AM on June 28, 2010

Whoops -- shii already posted translationparty, which seems to be slow/down at the moment. Here's one that works: http://tashian.com/multibabel/ (takes a sentence in English, "translates" it sequentially through a number of other languages using Babelfish, then back into English)
posted by tractorfeed at 5:57 AM on June 28, 2010

Response by poster: Thanx everyone
posted by yosh at 12:11 PM on June 28, 2010