Here's a fun site, courtesy of MetaFilter. Carl Tashian wrote a perl script that will run any text through Babelfish several times, using a different language each time. It's not unlike the old game telephone, where your final result bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original message. For your reading pleasure, I offer the first couple of sentences from Moby Dick:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
And then, translated in Babelfish from English to French to English to German to English to Italian to English to Portugese to English to Spanish to English? Behold Herman Melville:
_ if Ishmael call alcohol, to determine year he to have little -- never like for long time accurately -- or moneies inside in my GAC and me to have not to think zero, that, me to be certain in interest series, what me approximated mountain range and watery part world guards. The fact is a direction that milza of the hunting and must register the circulation. All mark to the dark degree this lucky increase of the Entdeckungselbst in the opening; all the marks that are a humidity, bruineux November in my heart; all the marks, that one that supports lucky person had discovered it, that involuntary the forms and the totality hardwired obtain to a rupture before the campings of the Sarges, of each burial I; and special all the marks that my side advanced of apanhou of the hypos, if of me, to that it demands, of who of a rule of the moral base extremely, due to me the end metodicamente to prevent the company intentionally and with the head of the pregos with the distant absentees with fixed people with a point in the way -- then, later calculation of him great hour to arrive not thus in the sea that I can.
Wow. Talk about a lucky increase of the Entdeckungselbst...
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