What to do when bored? Well there’s always Google translate to have some fun with.
First we need a text to play with, for instance Shakespeare’s ”To Be or Not To Be”-soliloquy. Not all of it (it is rather lengthy) but a bit, the first part that reads:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
What we’ll do next is run it through a number of translations, starting with Swedish (I won’t post the different translations here as it would bore anyone to tears). We then move on to Catalan, passing through Norwegian and Polish, onwards through Greek, Dutch, Slovak, Portugese, Azerbaijani and Welsh, before finally returning to something similar to English. The dazzling result:
And then there is the issue:
”CIS noble spirit, suffering
Fortunately, aggressive beats and arrows
Or that up in arms against the sea, which is about
In addition, the dead sleep;
Only one thing to say than desired
The heart aches, and in 1000 natural
Meat is not ”is a project that successor T
Wishd respect.
To savour it to the fullest, I recorded the audio and set it to a 1920 version of Hamlet starring Asta Nielsen as the tormented prince. It’s different, anyway.
The Difference Engine 