Blind faith in web tools

There is a lovely story in today's Guardian about what happens when you place too much faith in what you find on the web. A group of Dutch journalists planning a trip to Israel almost casued a diplomatic row when they used the online translation tool Babelfish when the Dutch Consulate requested a preview of the questions that the journalists intended to ask.

The email commenced "Helloh bud, Enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland," before posing a number of somewhat disturbing questions along the lines of "Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this".

It reminds me of the time when I used voice recognition software to translate my recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and ended up with a somewhat more surreal version. Sadly posterity has been robbed of this new and improved text, the file was lost in a hard drive partitioning incident, though I do recall the final line "So long lives this, and this gives life to fish"

The name Babelfish comes from Douglas Adam's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is such a brilliant idea, a creature that in breaking down the barriers to communication causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation" Perversely it is by not breaking down these barriers that the online version has caused offence.