OK, time for another riddle, people.
Everybody knows that machine translation systems are useless when translating fiction. However, there was one scene in the novel I’m translating that I knew would be translated perfectly by Google Reader. I tried it and it turned out I was absolutely right. The translation of the scene required almost no retouching after it came out of Google Translator.
Question: what kind of a scene was it and why did Google Translator translate it so perfectly?
I am thinking about a scene, which is almost word to word identical to numerous scenes in many other novels. You said women offer food and sex, and I would guess it has something to do with the latter. 🙂
Once I had nothing to read, so was forced to loan from another girl a yellow romance novel. Not only descriptions of sex scenes were each 1.5 pages (without exaggeration!), but they were all alike and super boring. Not sexy at all too.
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Or, may be, it was a quote from one of Russian classics? Though in a novel of this sort it seems unlikely.
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Was it about using a computer to Google?
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Conversation between two robots?
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Any scene with little use of metaphores or other figures… Detective novel/ kill scene? I guess anything on a cheap novel….
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I’m guessing maybe a scene that involves food or cooking?
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I’d expect something that’s available in multiple languages on the Web: owner’s manual or instructions, news story, or government report. None of those things sounds like a “scene,” so that leaves explicit sex. 😉
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I’m guessing it was something quoted from either Shakespeare or the Bible. If neither is true, then I’m betting on a sex scene.
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Or something that involves driving/walking directions (i.e. how to get from Point A to Point B.) Google is somehat of a “directions” master. 😉
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OK, everybody who said a sex scene, wins!!!
Erotic scenes are extremely repetitive, especially the kind that appears in mainstream fiction. When I saw this scene, I immediately knew that I’d seen it hundreds of times before. So I entered it into Google Translator to see if it had seen it as well and it turned out that it had. 🙂
So if you need to translate some soft vanilla porn, Google Translator is your friend!
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Imagine the piece of cake in translating “50 Shades of Grey”.
Now you know that a yellow novel is your best friend, with Google doing a lot instead of you. 🙂
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I thought sex was too obvious to be true! Ha ha. I kept thinking of things that were too complicated! 😉 (Although I personally use Google Translate for recipes and love it!) 🙂
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Sex scene…
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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