Wednesday, April 26, 2006

It Gains Something In Translation

Never mind why, but I took a post from a Spanish blog and put it through Babelfish--with interesting results.

Here is the original post, from Herut--obviously about Al-Qaeda:
No dar respiro ni a Al-Qaeda ni a Hamas.

Antonio Sanchez-Gijón habla del último comunicado de Al-Qaeda y de la falta de capacidad operativa de Ben Laden.

"Se puede entender lo dicho por John Negroponte, director de la Oficina de Inteligencia Nacional, de los Estados Unidos, el jueves de la pasada semana, en el National Press Club de Washington: "las capacidades operativas de Ben Laden se han visto substancialmente reducidas. No cuenta con un santuario y el alto mando de Al-Qaeda ya no es lo que era". En efecto, ese alto mando se halla reducido a tratar de dirigir la lucha desde sus escondites. Pero su estilo de conducción refleja distancia respecto de las terminales que causan el terror en otros lugares del mundo".
Now if you go to Babelfish, plug in the text and set it to translate from Spanish to English, you get the following:
Not to give breathing neither to Al-Qaeda nor to Hamas. Antonio Sanchez-Gijón speaks of the last official notice of Al-Qaeda and the lack of operational capacity of Horseradish tree Laden.
Yeah. Sounds about right.


Technorati Tag: and .

1 comment:

  1. Actually, Daled, interestingly enough, I was on the team that created Babel Fish. It's no where close to perfect, but it's still the best machine-based translation tool out there, imho!

    ReplyDelete

Comments on Daled Amos are not moderated, but if they are exceedingly long, abusive, or are carbon copies that appear over half the blogosphere, they will be removed.