Enjoyable cabbages get lost in translation
DO YOU enjoy eating cabbages? We’re not sure whether the teenager known online as binarypigeon does, but her mother tells us that when she wanted to test the limitations of online automatic translation systems, she typed the phrase “I enjoy eating cabbages” into one. She told it to translate this into Japanese – and then translate the resulting phrase back into English, and then translate that to another language, and then back to English, and so on.
After approximately 20 such translations, binarypigeon’s simple statement had turned into: “Therefore, that is eaten because of possibility…
