I know, I know, reverse Babelfish translations are old hat, but this one I find irresistible, so just this once… Surely everybody’s familiar with the classic 1979 Sugarhill Gang hit “Rapper’s Delight“? “I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie/ to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop/ the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie/ to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat…” Well, the folks at Shtick! sent it off to Italy and back (linguistically speaking), and they got this: “I have said a luppolo of the hip, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a luppolo and not arrested, one cliff it/ To the boogie of explosion of explosion as an example on the jump the boogie, to rhythm of the boogie, the beat…” It goes on and on, and it’s very funny. Via Boing Boing, and I thank Songdog for the tip.
Funny! But seriously–does anyone know of a seriously good online translation thingamajig?
No, and I doubt there will ever be one, if by “seriously good” you mean one that produces translations comparable to those of a human translator. Language is just too messy.
Here’s the only good machine translation tool I know of: http://dict.harlanlandes.com/
You should try Lingo Gator. It is a language translation aggregator that returns the results of the translation from three different translation services and then reverse translates back into the original language so that you can see what you text was translated into.
http://lingo.clarksco.com