Good Work, Lads!

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Babel Fish took the Russian phrase "Ne govoryu po russki, tovarisch" and rendered it in English as "Ne of govoryu po of russki, tovarisch."

Russians using Babel Fish must think, "English is easy! You just add 'of' a couple of times to a Russian sentence and... English!"

Comments

  1. shonk8:58 AM

    A Russian would probably use the proper alphabet for his language.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah11:16 AM

    Right, Shonk. I mean, I can translate τελοσ from Greek just fine, but if you show me telos... well, I just have no idea what that is!

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah12:13 PM

    Shonk, if I were to write a program like this, I would check what the user typed. Then, if the alphabet were a problem, I would:
    1) put out an error message saying 'type Cyrilic, man!'; or, better yet
    2) put in a transliteration table, which would take all of five minutes.

    What I would NOT do is just roll ahead and output rubbish.

    ReplyDelete

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