BabelFish Poetry |
Poésie BabelFish |
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. |
Ceci est une œuvre de fiction. Toute ressemblance à des personnes existant ou ayant existé serait purement fortuite. |
Date: 13 June 2000
Subject: Re: No Sex for the French
> If she writes in French, who
> will understand?
That has never been a problem for you, Gaby... why should it be for her?
Quoi qu'il en soit, AltaVista a un bon traducteur qui, bien que non parfait, pourrait changer probablement son français en anglais lisible. Je vous ai dupé avec lui par le passé, et je n'ai eu aucune erreur. La cuillère verte de poissons dans l'aliance minuscule de drogue n'a aucun sperme dans le potage.
-Nichelle
From: SAGReiss
Date: 20 June 2000
Subject: negatron's French
John's been working on his French. He told me he stayed up three consecutive nights translating a sentence I copied from the Memoires of the former Premier Ministre du Canada:
http://www.brian.mulroney.com
"The green spoon of fish in the miniscule drug alliance doesn't have any sperm in the soup?"
From: SAGReiss
Date: 20 June 2000
Subject: Le Sperme dans le potage
C'est de l'humour anglais, si tu veux. C'est notre facon de creer. Quelqu'un ecrit un texte, Nichelle en l'occurrence. Souvent le texte est deja rempli de jeux de mots, de fleurs de rhetorique, de fautes motivees, comme "aliance" par exemple. Quelqu'un le reprend en le mettant dans un autre contexte, en lui donnant une autre valeur, un autre sens. C'est moi, puis negatron sans le savoir, puis moi de nouveau. Les lettres sont volees et s'envolent, mais elles reviennent toujours a la source.
From: negatron
Date: 21 June 2000
Subject: Re: negatron's French
I took six years of core French in school and this is what I get for my troubles. I freely admit my poverty of linguistic talent. I'd like a translation.
Date: 21 June 2000
Subject: Son of Quit your Lamentations, Bitch
Here then is my understanding of the "Sperme dans le Potage" text. Nichelle wrote a sentence, possibly using her set of word magnets with which we used to make poems and other shit on our refrigerator, some of which found its way onto this list in various languages. I'm guessing that she chose the color green because of the text by Noam Chomsky and reinterpreted by Roman Jakobson we have spoken of so often: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." She then sent it through babelfish to translate it into French. She must have changed "alliance" to "aliance", picking up on the spelling mistake an Israeli clerk made when Clo created this account. I then sent it to negatron in private e-mail explaining that Brian Mulroney had said it to me when I served him and his Mr. Bufu tea at the Sheraton in New York. negatron then sent it back through babelfish to translate it back into English. I then copied the back-translation to the list suggesting that I had quoted it to negatron from Brian Mulroney's Memoires and giving a made-up URL. This is precisely what I mean when I say that words have no meaning but they do have consequences.
From: negatron
Date: 21 June 2000
Subject: Re: Son of Quit your Lamentations, Bitch
I only ran it through babelfish to confirm my own piss-poor translation, and was disturbed to find it mostly matched. We Saskatchewanians are suspicious of machine translation after our previous government spent a bunch of our tax money backing some fraudulent enterprise whose goal was to provide computerized translation of laws from English to French.