Lost in Translation (an international game of Telephone)

I was inspired, or maybe obsessed, by a poorly translated fortune in a fortune cookie. It as obviously a very profound phrase, I assume, prior to being translated into English. But now, it was odd.

When going from one language to another, something is usually lost. It got me thinking. What would happen when you chain multiple translations front to back and then finally translate it into the original language. That shouldn't be too hard to do. So I obsessively stayed up last Friday until the wee hours of Saturday, making the app. Hopefully getting it out of my head and onto the server would let me sleep.

Meanings get lost as words are translated from one language to another. Enter a simple phrase, choose a couple languages to build a chain of translation and see how the meaning at the end is not what it may have been intended to be.

Here is what I ended up with. Try it out. Let me know.

Lost in Translation (an international game of Telephone): http://openfermenter.com/lostintranslation

Tim

Conflicts should allow you to become better people. This one just showed that we have a ways to go.

Now that Bin Laden has suffered the consequence of his actions, maybe now those who broke the laws, and international standards of human behavior under the guise of keeping us safe can face their due consequences.

Can we quit celebrating the death of a terrorist, and turn an eye onto what our responses to his original acts have cost us as a country, and as human beings? I am glad our boogieman, Bin Laden, is not lurking in the in that barren desert cave (which turned out to actually be a large, comfortable, fortified Pakistan residence), but I have no pretense that this makes me safer. And I am a little saddened at how we did not take the opportunity to to use his actions to allow us to make ourselves better people, but instead a little bit less than we were before. We missed an opportunity.

The AP reports:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

At least now the Cat we Belled is gone. Hopefully, we will get another chance to show we know how to behave as humans.