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Apr. 18th, 2002 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetI have just breezed through a book review in French with minimal recourse to dictionaries, restoring a bit of self-esteem lost trying to read "La figura di Agrippina minore in Tacito," whose easy title falsely promised false things.
[I once told my boss I was daunted by the fact that I had so many things to read in Italian. He picked up the nearest thing in that langauge -- a book review we're publishing -- and held in front of me. "Surely you can read this," he said with some surprise (it's a romance language, innit?). But no, I can't. Little things like "vocabulary" and "verb conjugation" and in fact "entire grammatical structure of the whole fucking language" and so forth get in the way when you've never actually learned them.]
[I may have told this story before; the wife of a friend of mine studied linguistics with Chomsky at MIT, and there was a legendary grad student in that department who was once heard to exclaim, while sitting down with materials related to some obscure tongue, "I'm going to learn this language if it takes me a week!"]
Since I can't read Italian, I've been playing with Babelfish.
For example:
After the dead women of Agrippina the sad one is only remembered profezia; it is last the particular one that Tacit it reports on the woman, with with its reckless answer. Of new a heartbeat of terror sacred around the gigantic figure; Tacit it has perceived that not there was better tone than these solemn agreements and frightening dampens in order to let out to you definitively Agrippina from the scene. In LXI, 2 Cassio Dione, instead, ago to follow to the profezia of practices astrology and to the answer of Agrippina long, most frigid reflection on the folia of the men who only watch to their immediate advantage and then torments to the thought of the evil that is accompanied to you; given a similar system of the story, it seems later on that same Agrippina has created the irreparabile under the obsession of the profezia.
In Tacit invege its sgomentante will it has dominated until the last one, in a decision that drew food solo from linfe terrene; the picture is increased, extends to the mystery of the sovrumano, includes only the fato one to the last one, because, ring-establish to the world of the omens therefore familiar to Tacit, a end which they placed hand and sky and earth has seemed to the historian an adapted conclusion of that exceptional human vicissitude xOCCIDATx xDUMx xIMPERETx: this proterva challenge to the destiny, than finally reveals us because Agrippina had to soccombere, in its fills up rebellion to all the divine and human laws, but that, if possible, it magnifies it anchors more, it transports it in a aura of titanismo, worthy of its sovrumana energy, is also the last one xVOXx that of she risuona in the tacitiano story.
And so on.
I wonder if there is some pathology relevant to the psyche of the programmers that explains why whenever the word "morte" ("death") appears (rather often, as it turns out) it gets translated by the possible but less likely "dead women."
[I once told my boss I was daunted by the fact that I had so many things to read in Italian. He picked up the nearest thing in that langauge -- a book review we're publishing -- and held in front of me. "Surely you can read this," he said with some surprise (it's a romance language, innit?). But no, I can't. Little things like "vocabulary" and "verb conjugation" and in fact "entire grammatical structure of the whole fucking language" and so forth get in the way when you've never actually learned them.]
[I may have told this story before; the wife of a friend of mine studied linguistics with Chomsky at MIT, and there was a legendary grad student in that department who was once heard to exclaim, while sitting down with materials related to some obscure tongue, "I'm going to learn this language if it takes me a week!"]
Since I can't read Italian, I've been playing with Babelfish.
For example:
After the dead women of Agrippina the sad one is only remembered profezia; it is last the particular one that Tacit it reports on the woman, with with its reckless answer. Of new a heartbeat of terror sacred around the gigantic figure; Tacit it has perceived that not there was better tone than these solemn agreements and frightening dampens in order to let out to you definitively Agrippina from the scene. In LXI, 2 Cassio Dione, instead, ago to follow to the profezia of practices astrology and to the answer of Agrippina long, most frigid reflection on the folia of the men who only watch to their immediate advantage and then torments to the thought of the evil that is accompanied to you; given a similar system of the story, it seems later on that same Agrippina has created the irreparabile under the obsession of the profezia.
In Tacit invege its sgomentante will it has dominated until the last one, in a decision that drew food solo from linfe terrene; the picture is increased, extends to the mystery of the sovrumano, includes only the fato one to the last one, because, ring-establish to the world of the omens therefore familiar to Tacit, a end which they placed hand and sky and earth has seemed to the historian an adapted conclusion of that exceptional human vicissitude xOCCIDATx xDUMx xIMPERETx: this proterva challenge to the destiny, than finally reveals us because Agrippina had to soccombere, in its fills up rebellion to all the divine and human laws, but that, if possible, it magnifies it anchors more, it transports it in a aura of titanismo, worthy of its sovrumana energy, is also the last one xVOXx that of she risuona in the tacitiano story.
And so on.
I wonder if there is some pathology relevant to the psyche of the programmers that explains why whenever the word "morte" ("death") appears (rather often, as it turns out) it gets translated by the possible but less likely "dead women."
