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| J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway via Wikimedia Commons. |
Smut has been
experimenting with the recursive neural net algorithm of Google Translate, which breaks down in surprising ways when confronted with certain kinds of meaningless repetition in the source language (particularly in non-Roman alphabets)—which as Language Log has noted can create
wholly unfamiliar kinds of poetry,
Gertrude Stein texts,
Talking Heads lyrics, and other strangenesses—to create
his own work,
Your Yastreblyansky, obviously unwilling to be left behind wherever there is some really difficult and utterly pointless work to be done, has thought of a way of making it still more difficult and still more pointless, by trying it out on a language with an
ideographic writing system, namely Chinese, where there are two translation algorithms at work, one to convert the input (in this case Hanyu Pinyin wihout tone marks, where the system's default choices can be unrelated to your intentions) into characters, which have fixed meanings (often very vague out of context) and one to "read" the characters into an English framework.
It didn't work all that well (and I'm afraid I may keep trying), and I threw away some examples that may have been better than anything I've got here. But here it is, anyway. The first is baed on repeatedly typing the sequence "xigeda".
Cicada
West slightly larger than big
West slightly larger than big
The Great West is the size of the world
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger slightly larger
Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger slightly larger slightly larger slightly larger
The Great West is the size of the world
