Tuesday 21 July 2009

the weirdest thing

This is completely unrelated to art, illustration, design or any of the other things I set out to write about here. It's just a little thing, a trifle for the day. Let's call it a linguistic diversion. This is because I'm about to spend the day tiling the kitchen and haven't got anything better to put here.

So, like some desperate, lonely loser, I was googling myself on Google blogsearch, and came across this very odd site called readingeagle.myloger.com on which at least two of my posts have appeared but in completely (and quite delightfully) mangled English! For example, my clocks post on Tuesday comes out like this:

As a in some measure of my melancholy modify for the stubbornness the clock (yeah yeah, I’ll fastened up adjacent to it after this), I’ve been trawling the internet to descry what else I can after. If no more than I had loadsa well-to-do (and a MUCH bigger house), eh? Above: from Clock Props in London, where you can letting clocks as props or acquisition bargain them for the stubbornness your undisturbed. Clockwise from nonentity leftist: 1930s two-sided try clock Ј650, 1950s cream moving clock sold etc.

Weirdy funny weirdness! They also have my Cleo Mussi post up here, and it's really quite funny. Here's another gem (which I wrote about Pigeon Vintage yesterday):

I had a look at the recline of the ingredients they deracinate someone’s associate for the stubbornness selling and, me oh my, do they deracinate someone’s associate some tasty-looking things.

Oh someone please explain? Is it a thing that trawls random blogs and translates them (albeit somehow back into English)? Whatever it is, I am finding it very entertaining...

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, it looks like the site is piling stuff into Google Translate or similar, converting it out of English and then back again. That sort of double-translation usually yields "creative" results, and it wouldn't be hard to automate the process of looking for pages containing the word "eagle", for example, and then double-translating and reposting them.

    As for the motivation, your guess is as good as mine. Seems pretty weird to me... :)

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  2. By coincidence, a post on a linguistics blog I read recently mentioned something very similar. In case you're interested/bored: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003583.php.

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  3. Thanks for that, Jon, it was really interesting, especially the person who had tried 'do you want to be my girlfriend?' in Google translate! x

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