There and back again…maybe

There are many ways to define artificial intelligence. One I remember hearing decades ago was that a computer could be considered to be intelligent if it could work out the underlying humorous meaning and intent associated with a sentence like “Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like bananas.”

Have you ever used Google Translate to convert some text from your native language into another tongue and then bring it back again? The results can be very funny or very scary, depending on your point of view.

Just translating something like a technical article from a foreign language into English can result in complete gobbledygook. Speaking of which, I just ran across a wonderful Gobbledygook Generator that comes up with gems like:

This is no time to bite the bullet with our holistic administrative paradigm shifts.

Actually, if you really want to baffle the people you work with, check out this Corporate Gibberish Generator, which generates seemingly-meaningful rubbish featuring your company, such as the following for EE Times:

EETimes is the industry leader of subscriber-defined initiatives. Without well-planned subscriber communities, robust, holistic methodologies are forced to become 1000/60/60/24/7/365. Think front-end. Our cross-media feature set is unmatched in the industry, but our B2C action-items and easy operation is often considered a terrific achievement. Is it more important for something to be client-focused or to be blog-based? If all of this may seem discombobulating to you, that's because it is! What does it really mean to evolve “super-proactively”? […]

But we digress… The reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I just saw this translation infographic over on the Verbalink.com website.