Saturday, March 19, 2011

A Thought

If you're looking for an alternate description, why not translate the name into another language and then back?

After all, "Tower of Cat-like Beings" becomes this in traditional Chinese, "塔似貓神仙", but if you feed it back through the same program it reads it as "Tower feline gods", which turns to this "貓神塔", which becomes "Cat God Tower", which is where it finally ends up? I put in "Place of the ugly pig-snouts", or "醜陋的地方豬鼻子", and it turned into "Local pig ugly nose", which is this "本地豬鼻子", and translates back as "Local farms ugly nose", where it stops. How about "Sword, Cursed Backbiting", which is a fairly standard magic item? It becomes "劍,詛咒誹謗", or "Sword, cursed libel" which transmutes itself to "劍,詛咒誹謗" where it comes to a halt. What about "head-cutting blade used on monsters", or a Vorpal Sword? It becomes "頭切割刀片用於怪物" ("Cutting blade for a monster head"), which in turn goes to "切割刀片的怪獸頭", or "Monster head cutting blade", which is the end of the sequence.

For even more complexity, you could put it through English-Traditional-Simplified-English. For example, "Cow-beast tower-lands, spiral above like water down a drain", is "牛頭獸塔土地,螺旋以上如水下了排水" in traditional, but "
牛头兽塔土地,螺旋以上如水下了排水", in simplified, though since I got "Tau land animal tower, above the water spiral down the drain" from this it method, it may be useless.

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