Thanks to Will Benton I'm having a Translation Party: type in a phrase and the site translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until "achieves equilibrium" — that is, you get the same output every time. Sometimes that happens quickly, sometimes not at all. This yields something interesting: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Also the first sentence of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.”

It gives up on this one: “And malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.”

On this one (a line from Richard Wilbur) it seeks simplification: “The sky became a still and woven blue.”

With this one it says it has achieved equilibrium when it really hasn’t: “I repose by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors” (Whitman). And here's a party waiting to happen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

6 Comments

  1. I jammed it with "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive."

  2. It choked on "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York", but the final rendering in English was kind of poignant:
    "In the winter of discontent, the summer is the glory of New York."

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