Find Your Equilibrium with Google-Powered Translation Party

To end the week on a lighter note, here's a very cool little tool that's sure to eat up your free time. It's called Translation Party, and it gives you a quick and easy way to perform a well-worn translation trick.

When you enter an English phrase into the site's box and hit "Find Equilibrium," the site will automatically translate your words [using Google's translation tool] into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes until the Japanese and English match exactly. By the time the two phrases match, it's been turned into something quite different. The whole process is a bit like a game of bilingual telephone.

It works best with sentences or phrases that are out of the ordinary, so poetry provides the perfect fodder for a party. For my first Translation Party, I grabbed the book within nearest reach, which happened to be Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I entered a phrase from Ecclesiastes that is on the novel's first page: "...unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." [The translator didn't recognize the word "whence," and I had to change it to "where."] This is what it came up with:

"Here, the intrusion of water from the river" isn't even close to the original phrase, but it's kind of interesting in its own way. My favorite example so far is when I entered "You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them" from Kenny Rogers' The Gambler. I wound up with "I know the time to keep me," which is a pretty zen way to say the same thing.

Have fun with this tool! The possibilities for humor and insight are pretty much endless. Plus it really highlights issues with slippery signification: Derrida would be so proud.