I owe this one to Jim Caughran of Willowdale, Ontario. He is the publisher of a small-press magazine (a "fanzine") called A Propos de Rien that is distributed through the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, a fanzine group to which I’ve belonged for many years. In issue 257 of A Propos de Rien he speaks of an Internet site that makes hilarious use of the Babelfish computer program to translate phrases in and out of five different languages, with remarkably chaotic results.

Computer translation programs, in the current state of the art, are reasonably good at equating one language with another. But they have understandable trouble with slang and local idioms, and the differences in basic grammatical structure between languages cause other difficulties, all of which become cumulative if you run a series of translations of the same sentence.

The sentence Jim Caughran chose to use is an old catchphrase of science fiction fans: "Fandom is just a goddamn hobby." The translation program turned it first into French:Fandom est juste un sacre passe-temps.

Which became, moving back to English: Fandom right one is crowned pastime.

And on to German: Recht man Fandom ist gekroenter Pastime.

English: Quite one fan cathedral is crowned Pastime.

Into Italian: Abbastanza una cattedrale del ventilatore e pastime crowned.

English again: Enough one cathedral of the fan is pastime crowned.

This, in Portuguese: Bastante uma catedral do ventilador e pastime coroado.

Back to English: Sufficiently a cathedral of the fan is pastime crowned.

Then Spanish: Una catedral del ventilador es suficientemente pasa-tiempo coronado.

Which gives us, finally, this triumphant statement: A cathedral of the ventilator is sufficiently crowned pastime.How did this happen? Why did the translation program foul things up so badly? Let’s go over it step by step.

Right at the beginning, the French translation, unable to handle an American idiom, desperately gives us sacre for "goddamn." It must have taken the "god" part of that word as permission to translate "goddamn" as "sacred" or "holy." But sacre, unfortunately, also is a French noun meaning "anointing" or "coronation," and when the phrase came back into English, it was that latter meaning that the computer picked–giving us "crowned pastime" in place of "goddamn hobby."

The next problem crops up in the German. The computer, struggling with "fandom," sees dom, which is German for "cathedral," and makes "fan cathedral" out of the word on the next bounce into English. Now it is the turn of Italian to translate "fan" not as amatore, which is the actual Italian equivalent of "fan" in the sense of a hobbyist, but as ventilatore, which is a different kind of fan entirely. Meanwhile the English "just," meaning "merely," becomes the not quite equivalent juste in French and things get worse from there.

Science fiction writers, as you know, are in the habit of equipping their spacefaring heroes with translating devices that swiftly and accurately render unfamiliar alien languages into lucid English. We have always suspected that creating such a device would be, of course, easier said than done. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 story "The Translator," which pokes lethal fun at the concept of a translating machine, a hapless Earthman meeting with two alien species at once has one group tell him things like "Warlike viciously now descendant fat food flame death" while the other comes through the translating gizmo with sounds that can be translated, the machine says, as "1. Fish market. 2. Fish harvest. 3. Sunspots visible from a depth of 10 meters below the surface of the ocean on a calm day. 4. Traditional festival. 5. Astrological configuration in galactic core."

That’s science fiction. But here in the mundane world we now have an actual translating program, capable of garbling things just as effectively using only Terrestrial languages, and using it in the extreme manner (to be fair, it never really was designed to translate the same sentence in and out of five languages other than English) shows us how tough the translating job really is. You probably want to know the address of the program so you can produce your own linguistic spaghetti and here, before we proceed, it is:

<www.tashian.com/multibabel>

One of its wonders is that it won’t necessarily give you the same garble twice. When I ran "Fandom is just a goddamn hobby" through a second time it chose not to translate "goddamn" into French at all, merely carrying it through as an untranslatable English idiom–thus giving me, on the final bounce, The cathedral of the ventilator is of the pastime of right one of goddamn. Then, to avoid the "goddamn" problem entirely, I used "accursed" instead, and that turned into the correct French word, maudit. But for some reason that word got only a one-way translation and came back to me in English unchanged, which led eventually to The cathedral of the ventilator is expert of Pastimemaudit.

Then I tried Nathan Hale’s famous last words, which I misremembered as "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." By the time this had passed through German and Spanish it had become I unfortunaty (sic) regard it that I have however one life span to destroy for my country, and sending it on to Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish morphed it into Unfortunaty is concerned what I nevertheless lasts of distrugg for my country.

But upon checking I discovered that what Nathan Hale actually said was, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country," and the insertion of that small adverb created vast changes in the outcome. "I regret" became, passing through Italian, not "unfortunaty" this time, but "me sorrow," and "only" came back as "solo." "Me sorrow" then turned into the Spanish yo dolor, which gave me, at the end, I pain, de.solo that an I nevertheless lasts of distrugg for my country, similar but rather more poetic than the earlier version and even less comprehensible.

Shakespeare, of course, is rich territory for babelizing. "The quality of mercy is not strained" returned from French as "the quality of pity is not tended," which went in and came out of German as "the quality of Pity is not bent," which Italian transformed into "the quality of pity is not folded." "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" saw "praise" turn into "congratulate" in French, "bury" become "embed" in Portuguese, and, after some Spanish word-order manipulations, the end result was, "I come to insert to Caesar in congratular it to it of the order no." (Now put that last sentence back in the program as a starting point and see where you get!)

Poor Shakespeare. "It falleth as the gentle rain from heaven" gently evolves into Falleth appreciates the force of motivatings of the rain of the sky. And King Lear’s magnificent rant, "I shall do such things, I know not what they are, but they shall be the terror of the Earth," suffers a sea-change when the program fails to distinguish the German irregular verb wissen ("to know") from the adjective weiss ("white") because the German for "I know" is ich weiss, and by one route and another we get, "I give the form to such things, the white man of no, of whom which are, are only the terror of the track."

Honest Abe Lincoln’s straightforward "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" picks up an androidal tone on the way back from Italian: "It has dedicated the demand that all the men are manufactured are similar to it towards the outside" and at the finale is: "It dedicated the demand that all the men are manufactured are similar it stop the external part." Alexander Pope’s "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" makes the digital journey and emerges as "Small of the knowledge it is dangerous that."

And when I turned to Lewis Carroll for "And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings," I found myself, via Spanish, with the charmingly Wonderlandish "And because he is to cook to the hot furnace of the sea and if the pigs have the wings." I did not, of course, waste the computer’s time on " ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbal in the wabe," which I suspected would sound pretty much the same after five translations as it did at the outset. But I did try it on "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you’re at! Up above the word you fly, like a teatray in the sky," and received this marvelously eloquent French version:

Scintillement, scintillement, petite batte! Comment je me demande a ce que vous etes! Vers le haut de au-dessus du monde vous volez, comme un teatray dans le ciel!"

Which is so beautiful that I almost feared to see what the computer would do to it in English translation. This is what I got:

Flutter, flutter, small beater! How I wonder so that you are! To the top of above the world you fly, like a teatray in the sky!

To the top of above the world, indeed. It’s perfect. Flutter, flutter, small beater! I loved it.

The computer program was satisfied too, evidently. It quit right there, refusing to translate those lovely lines into German. "Could not translate" is what I was told, and that itself went through the changes, the Italian version coming forth as "It has not been able translate" and the Spanish as "It could not translates."

But you can. You’ve got the address. You want to know how Tolkien sounds in Babelese, don’t you? What becomes of the clear, rational prose of Robert A. Heinlein as it passes through five European languages? And then there’s T.S. Eliot . . . the Book of Revelation . . . Tolstoy . . . Franz Kafka. . . .

It’s all yours. Thanks a lot, Jim Caughran, for hours of idle fun. And you too, Carl Tashian, for dreaming up the original software.

Fandom is just an accursed hobby, indeed.