Fun with machine translation party

This is my latest post in the translators' portal, proz.com.

There is a lot of (horror) stories about machine translation. My favorite story for the last thirty years goes like this.

The sentence "Out of sight, out of mind" is well known. If you do not see a person for a long time, you tend to forget him. This is true of really famous stars, who suddenly stop acting and fade away from the public gaze. Within a short span of time people just forget them and new people who come on to the scene, have not even heard of them. You got the picture? More about this later.

Let us come back to the sentence, "Out of sight, out of mind". It seems that this sentence was fed into a computer for translation into Russian. The resulting sentence was fed into another computer for translating back into English. The sentence that came out was "Invisible idiot".

You will have to keep in mind that this story has been circulating for more than 30 years and at that time machine translation was not that much known.

Have things become better? I was reading this post about machine translation by google translate and was introduced to this hilarious game.

One sentence in English is to be typed in a box for the purpose of back and forth translation. The moment you click for finding the equilibrium, the machine translation program goes on translating from English into Japanese and back to English and so on, till two successive English sentences are the same. Then you get the message saying that the equilibrium is found.

I give below the result I found. The original sentence describes a beautiful maiden coming to a garden along with her playmates and gets separated from them. She meets a handsome man and falls in love with him. A typical start to a love story.

Original
The young charming heroine out on a game in a garden with her friends gets separated from the latter and wanders around.

into Japanese
彼女の友達と一緒に庭でゲームに小さな魅力的なヒロインを、後者から分離されるの中をうろうろ。

back into English
The heroine in the game in a small attractive garden with her friend, separated from the parade around the latter.

back into Japanese
彼女の友人は、後者の周りのパレードで区切られた小さな魅力的な庭園では、ゲームでのヒロイン。

back into English
Her friend, a charming garden, separated by a small parade around the latter, the heroine of the game.

back into Japanese
彼女の友人は、魅力的な庭園は、後者の周りに小さなパレードで区切られた、ゲームの主人公。

back into English
Her friend, an attractive garden, separated by a small parade around the latter, the hero of the game.

back into Japanese
彼女の友人、魅力的な庭園は、後者の周りに小さなパレードで区切られた、ゲームの主人公。

back into English
Her friend, an attractive garden, separated by a small parade around the latter, the hero of the game.

Equilibrium found! That's deep, man.

I am curious. Let us now try the sentence "Out of sight, out of mind" and see what we get. Here goes:

Original
Out of sight, out of mind

into Japanese
視界の外に心の

back into English
Heart out of sight

back into Japanese
心臓が視力

back into English

Eye heart

back into Japanese
眼部

back into English
Eye

back into Japanese
アイ

back into English
I

back into Japanese
わたし

back into English
I

Equilibrium found!

There you are. Have a nice day.

Regards,
Dondu N. Raghavan