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Nice!

There's a radiator key in the bureau. → The underground has a key to the office.

"I sometimes wonder if it's ok to put forks inside my pants" -> "You can see that pierce with pier and pier."
"A fat cat was eating" -> "the fat cat was food"
Makes me think of toki pona, which doesn't distinguish between eating and being food.
You are what you eat after all, so this is technically correct haha.
Doesn't work on Firefox 68.
That’s a 3-year-old version, long out of support…
Firefox 68? That's so old the code is half Aramaic...
It's one of the latest really private versions, it doesn't try to connect to tens of various websites under the shitto "your security & privacy is of paramount importance to us" and works with %99 of the websites. The %1 websites aren't essential or worth visiting anyway. So whether its code is Aramaic or Lateinic, it's good.
Firefox is not used in 68.
Whether it's used commonly or not, it's one the latest versions which don't interfere with your privacy and it works with %99+ of the websites. The %1- sites which don't work, aren't essential or worth visiting, so I'm fine with it :)
You should consider upgrading your Firefox version by 40%.
It works with %99 of the websites. Besides it's one of the latest versions that don't undermine your privacy.
Result:

Firefox is not 66 years.

That's interesting change going from 68 to 66.

`I struggle with brain farts. -> Sorry for the brain disorder.`

This cannot be a coincidence. I feel like the author has spoken.

Shall we play a game? Guess the original song based on the translation:

To the ventilation of the gas ventilation in the ventilation

A warm odor of jam, wind

I saw a bright light before the front

The weight of my head and check

I had to let me get at night.

He stood at the door.

I heard an accredited work

I think that

"Time or hell".

And transmit the light that takes

to continue

I think he heard his story.

breathe, warm, light, story etc make me think of something by Pearl Jam, Bush or Fleetwood Mac but honestly I have no clue.
Not sure if others had this experience but by a few lines into the text I was hearing these words sung to the tune of hotel california while reading them.

My conscious had zero awareness of what was going on, but my subconscious got it immediately.

I had the exact same thing. Started humming it but it made no sense,so I thought "nah, probably some new song that I don't know". Interesting!
Exactly same experience.
It's arguably the most famous song of all time so not that suprising imo.
That's an interesting claim, but it's plausible. I would have thought "Happy Birthday" or some Beatles song. Is there a list of most recognized songs someplace?
Bizarrely, same! I actually thought I was getting it wrong but was like "Damn, too bad this stuck in my head" haha!
Can you guess my theme?

"You want to destroy your enemies, look at them before sadness of sadness from a woman."

"Do you remember when you decide the meeting? I lun."

"It's not a mood!"

"Back."

Schwarzenegger films? Don't recognise the middle two, but the first one is obviously Conan and the last one is presumably Terminator?
Yep! The middle two are, "Do you remember when I promised to kill you last? I lied," and "It's not a tumor!"

Other catchphrases:

"Get to the chopper!" ended up as, "Get ten people."

"Let off some steam, Bennet," ended up as, "Free steam, release Bennett."

"Hasta la vista, baby," ended up as "Hasta La Vista Kids." The engine correctly identified "hasta la vista" as not being in the native language and left it alone at every step, except that it got transliterated for some languages (but not all!) and ended up capitalized in the end.

Potten-in-bag faster and blue to steal the stomach in the bag.
"Hello" -> "Good night!"

Interesting to see a simple word and meaning flipped on its head. It even gained an explaination mark!

It'd be great if we could see all 10 translations matched alongside English to see how it devolves per translation.

No offense intended, but it's "exclamation mark" - it's a common mistake.
None taken, you are correct after all.

And thank you, I was looking at it wondering why it didn't look or sound quiet right, I just didn't catch it.

I assume in one of the steps, "Hello" was translated into a word that was for both greeting and farewell (such as "ciao" in Italian) and then the next step translated it into the farewell.
`Great to see you -> Mouth`

And I thought translation is so good these days

Context matters. If you don't have context you can't translate faithfully.

Some expressions have multiple meanings.

Humans do a very good job guessing the most likely meaning, but the main metric of what constitutes the most likely meaning is the context. The other metric is which meaning is the most common. But humans can disagree about what they think is most common/reasonable.

The shorter the text, the less internal context, the more opportunities for drift.

For example consider the full sentence:

> The farmer allows walkers to cross the field for free, but the bull charges.

Here it's clear it's a word play on the multiple meanings of the verb "to charge" and a human translator can decide to traduce it correctly but losing the word play or to just give up or invent an equivalent word play.

But in isolation "the bull charges" is likely to be interpreted as the bull is going to hit you with its horns, rather than it will require you to give it some money.

Now, you just have to find a word that behaves this way one the way back to English, which gets more and more likely the more languages you use in the chain.

In this case, shouldn't a translator give me both options? E.g. it should translate both "the bull attacks" and "the bull requires payment". If it can find a single word with both meanings in the target language, use that. Otherwise, return multiple options — a UI could allow the user to choose, presenting the meaning of each translation alongside it.
> the bull requires payment

Is the bull the one requiring or being required the payment? Or is bull used as a noun or a verb - I mean it's just too ambiguous to do anything with, and some ambiguity is hard to even notice without a context. Though, "the bull charges" is worse; it can't even be determined whether it's first or second person interaction, so "the bull requires" is definitely a clarification.

Most automated translators indeed offer multiple translations. The UI may decide to offer a default choice and to offer a way to explore the alternatives.

TFA is about building a chain of 10 "default translations". Picking "the right translation" manually on each step would defeat the purpose of the demo.

Is your mother’s health better now? -> Is it? Is your health good?
I am. —> I want to be.
To be, or want to be. That is the question.
To be or not to be --> According to Noah
“To repair the joint, one has to oil the ball bearings” -> “To the spherical tank must be oil to restore the connection”
Could something like this be used as a loss function in a neural net? It seems like perfect translations could be translated back and forth many times.
Your comment run through a few times:

The great Bible translation is the best idea to live your life.

Maybe it'd work for certain languages and phrases but many words/phrases have imperfect translations across languages and the same sentence could map to multiple valid translations.
Urgent brown foxes are jumping lazy dogs.
Mine took a different route from (I assume) the same initial input: "The brown fox jumped quickly on the lazy dog." Which isn't really that much loss, I think.
How many forests can produce firewood. Can you have wooden forests?

.

.

.

.

.

.

From: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

“How much is a jewelry on wood?”

From your derived comments.

(comment deleted)
"Be excellent to each other." -> "It may be better to be different."
One of my favourite ever YouTube channels, that sadly isn’t around anymore, explored this concept with the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ theme song. If anyone’s interested check CDZA out!

https://youtu.be/LMkJuDVJdTw

Hah! That was my first thought as well when I read the headline. Classic video!
Speaking of the Fresh Prince, I tried this:

"Keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth"

Which became:

"I saved my wife's name in your mouth."

Another attempt produced:

"My wife's name is in your stupidity."

Hi, what's your name? -> Hey! What's your name?

In Slovak going from friendly to rude.

What's today for lunch? -> What's the food condition now?

That changed completely.

I wish you could just choose the languages (with random option) on one screen and translate them all at same time with end result instead clicking through.

It would have been cool to see a translation to the original language at every step, to reveal the gradual loss of meaning.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog --> Bad F. FO FRO GRO

Lol

I got "Fast Nasio Fox turned unknown dogs"
"I am nothing more than a sentient being suffering while waiting for the sweet release of death." -> "I won't wait for a living because I don't expect to live from life."

I too don't expect to live from life

“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck” -> “Number of numbers”

I’ll concede it’s not an easy sentence to make sense of in another language, let alone 10 and back…It does still make me question how much damage has been caused (in the most general sense) due to meaning being lost in translation between people.

In the movie “Arrival”—which is mainly about establishing communication with an extraterrestrial species that visited earth goes fairly in depth into what I consider very realistic challenges and possible methodologies of teaching the aliens our (English) language, and us learning theirs. They even built a rudimentary translator once they had a solid enough understanding. Would highly recommend watching it if you like this kind of content.

Thank you for sharing OP.

That was a great short story.

In contrast, I just read Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, author of the Martian, and boy is translation between alien languages nice and trivial in that.

Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't experience time the same way we do? Or something along those lines. When something that fundamental is different, that has to become a major hurdle in communication.

Whereas the aliens in Project Hail Mary are still fundamentally similar organisms. And you just have to come up with a common baseline to understand each other. Humans have been able to learn to translate between different languages for a long time now. It seemed no different than that to me. Especially when you add in machine assistance.

I would actually be quite curious though. If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate? Now it wouldn't be a perfect comparison because there is likely shared body language. It would still be interesting.

Im contractually obligated to mention the novel The Dragons Egg, which followed the interactions between humans and life that evolved on a neutron star. Major time issues in that one. Fun read!
Author?
Robert L. Forward

“Hard” sci-fi, but the neutron star gravity pummels anything hard to goo anyway.

> If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate?

I would sign up for that even, maybe. I think the main problem with that idea is that willingness to spend time in such an endeavour is highly positively correlated with knowledge of certain well-spread Indo-European languages. ;)

> If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate?

They can (somewhat) effectively communicate right from the start, and third party observers who speak neither language can mostly follow along too. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3qqYyQC9ww

> Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't experience time the same way we do? Or something along those lines.

Yes, but an important detail in the plot (possibly a spoiler) is that they experience time differently _because_ of the structure of their language, sort of an extreme outcome of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A human learning their language will eventually experience time in the same way. Notably this is the pattern used by most of the stories in the collection that Arrival was derived from (Stories of your life and others). The author takes a phrase, hypothesis, etc and creates a story out of an extreme and concretized outcome from it. All of the stories in the collection are well worth reading IMO.

as far as I can recall, in the Arrival story ("the story of your life") the aliens eyes are a continous ring that has a 360 degree view.

I also recall that the aliens were impressed by humans standing in 'only' two legs. as their entire biology was radially symmetric.

this is why their perception is so unlike ours.

I love this.

> There once was a man from Nantucket

> Who carried his balls in a bucket

Became...

> Once the man was a man

> Take the ball to the pan

I love that it still rhymes.

"My name is Ibrahim" -> "My name is Abraham"

This is exactly what happens when I tell people my name in the US. At least, now I know that Americans are deca-lingual.