Babel Fish Telephone: or why Babel Fish doesn't work.

Here's an experiment I've been doing for a while when it's late, there's no good skin flicks on, and I just feel like fucking around with something that is not called a "power tool." For as long as I can remember there has been an online service called "Babel Fish." This is an online service (named after the "Hitchhiker's Guide" creature of the same name) that originally started as an alta vista website (geez, when was the last time anyone ever heard that name?) and now it's a yahoo service. Pretty much you type in a phrase and you can translate through several languages. The thing is, it's not very good, observe a little exercise of telephone. I started out this journey by typing in a simple phrase "I enjoy cake with my tea." in english.



simple enough, so I then translated it to English's closest language cousin, German.



So far so good, it seems like it could be what I initially wrote because it has a close number of words. I didn't test it out, but I'm going to assume that says "I enjoy cake with my tea." in German. Then I "translated" from German to French.



This is when things seem to get weird. Now, my limited knowledge of French tells me that sentence structure is very different between germanic and romance languages, but as far as number count goes this just turned from a simple sentence to something illegible. Let's throw in a curve ball and translate from French to Dutch.



Wow, personally I'm almost frightened to see what in the fuck that even says. So, that said let's get back to jolly old English.



Yup, just what I expected. This is like a Bizarro version of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" where you have to try to get as far away as possible to the original phrase. What started as an innocent enough phrase of "I enjoy cake with my tea." has gone through the channels and become hideous Engrish of utmost proportions and has been raped and pillaged to say "I profited of the cakes of my the." Try it sometime when you're bored, you get especially wonderful results when you go into a completely different alphabet like Greek or Mandarin.

-Jonny Gonzo