Long time I came upon this link through one of the people in Twitter - Translation Party. The page takes a sentence in English, translates it into japanese and re-translates back into english till two successive translations give the same sentence. In other words, you can say that this goes on till a ‘translation equilibrium’ is reached. Please try the link and have a look at the results of the sentences you get. It surely is hilarious but as I played around an interesting coincidence struck me.

The game of Chinese whispers we play in gatherings has a close correlation maybe… So for the uninitiated, Chinese whispers is a game wherein you whisper a sentence into your neighbor’s ear who in turn whispers to his neighbor… as it completes one full round the original sentence is compared with the version that traveled through people’s ears. Invariably, it happens that the original sentence is so distorted that it always results in hilarity. So what I did was took a sentence from the Chinese whispers game(of course through googling! :) ) and sent it through the translation party. “Goofy Grinning Gophers gobbled gigantic grapes while juggling” was the sentence I sent across and this is the result - Translation Party

  • Goofy Grinning Gophers gobbled gigantic grapes while juggling
  • Gophers while juggling a goofy grin and gobbled a giant grape
  • Meanwhile, juggling a goofy Gophers grinning and laugh and gobbled’s giant grape
  • On the other hand, grinning, goofy Gophers and juggling huge grapes of laughter and gobbled
  • On the other hand, grinning, drinking giant grape in the goofy Gophers laughter Maru and juggling
  • Grin and drink giant grape in the goofy Gophers laughter Maru and juggling, meanwhile,
  • The goofy Gophers laughter circled in giant grape and juggling, while drinking, and grin
  • Goofy Gophers laughter giant grapes, juggling, drinking a smile and while Maru
  • Juggling, smile, goofy Gophers laughter giant grape drink - equilibrium…

It would be really interesting to compare a transcript of a Chinese whispers game in progress with the translationparty.com output. Both have the noisy channel assumption, but do they really correlate if at all they do? Can they be really compared or is it like comparing apples with oranges? Will a cognitive study of the game of chinese whispers lead to better translation techniques? These thoughts may be outright crazy offshoots of a tired brain’s attempt to hallucinate research ideas. But hopefully this craziness really has a spark that can ignite some innovation in the future.