On the Corruption Caused By Machine Translation
I was recently doing some research, and needed to perform a library search on the topic of "programmable matter." Don't look for it in any of the current journals; it's one of those quaint ideas that just doesn't work, like tachyon beams or tuned string harmonics... or nanobots, which, I hope you all remember, do *not* work except in the presence of notum.
In any case, when nothing recent turned up in my search, I set things to automatically translate from the ancient languages, and set my search program rummaging through the complete Terran archives-- information may not be free, but a hunt through otherwise-unused storage media is pretty cheap! I then waited three months for the full result set. I realize that this is a very unusual step, but I know that no significant research on my subject has been performed for millenia-- the idea doesn't WORK, never did, people gave up on it a long time ago.
Upon opening the results, I was astounded. My local information storage had been flooded with pornography. Not just pornography, but *strange* porn. I hesitate to describe it more precisely, except to note that I do not think some of these items are meant for viewing by what we would think of as human beings, and that Eric Miller didn't look half bad in a transparent speedo.
After a brief interval scanning the results to see if the technical papers I wanted were somehow buried in this flood of imagery, I turned to a more useful activity: wondering. How *could* my original query, which was mainly a list of engineering terms, turn up this amazing quantity of filth? Further research into that topic involved several more months of back-and-forth communication with Terran archivists, and this is what we discovered: Computer translation causes lewdness.
My query had been translated through a chain of successively older and older languages-- current automatic translators are available for most languages going back a thousand years or so, and older programs exist that can translate them into even older ones, and so on. The final queries were executed in the languages being queried, and all results were passed back up the chain, so to speak.
However, in almost all languages, there are a large number of verbs that end up being turned into euphemisms for sex. Everybody talks about sex, and nobody seems to like to just come out and say "****", at least not over and over. Poetic license takes hold, and various activities... hammering, growing grass, shopping for calamari... become known mainly as ways to say, "to ****." Even worse, almost every language has the construct "to do," "to perform," or some such... and this almost ALWAYS ends up being one of these euphemisms. To top things off, many engineering terms are made up by engineers, who usually end up calling important processes things like "to do thingywhacking."
After five or six machine translations, my requests for technical documents had been automatically transformed into demands for the depiction of the most hideous, vile acts imaginable, and some more hideous and vile than that. The text portions of the results, passed back up the same way, became little more than endlessly repeated streams of profanity.
With this understanding of the problem at hand, I have been able to refine my queries somewhat, and to add layers of requests to recast the questions themselves as technical, not prurient. I have met with some success. Just this week, I have obtained images of robots and what may be atomic calculation matrices from some eighteen thousand years ago. If the sodiums in the matrix appear to be spiroinking elements of the carbon substrate, that may just be my own low expectations at work. The robots, on the other hand, are obviously having a good time.
