Lost in translation
Dec 05, 2007
Since English is my second language, I have always been intrigued by automatic translation. My "Turing" test for translation engines is to feed the translated output back into the same engine in the opposite direction.
Case in point: the first sentence of this post is translated by Babelfish into Italian -
Poiché l'inglese è la mia seconda lingua, sono stato incuriosito sempre tramite la traduzione automatica.
Now, Babelfish translates the above Italian text into English, as:
Since English is my second language, has been made curious always through the automatic translation.
Not that bad, really.
The tag line of this blog is "recycling chartjunk into junk art". What happens in the other direction? The answer is on this page!
This entry is inspired by Michael M.
What a great example of chartjunk in that link! The first Excel chart wasn't too bad, them BAM, pimp my chart.
A line graph would have probably been best to show the batting average of the three players over the time period.
Thanks for the good laugh.
Posted by: Tony | Dec 05, 2007 at 08:52 PM
You too can make charts for USA Today!
Posted by: Jon Peltier | Dec 05, 2007 at 09:35 PM
Seriously. Horrible graph. They didn't even use baseballs to represent the information nor did they utilize small umpire icons or gloves. A crying shame.
Posted by: nathan | Dec 05, 2007 at 10:19 PM
I tried that translation experiment with your tag line, using French instead of Italian:
"Re-use of the refuse of diagram like art of refuse"
Posted by: John S. | Dec 06, 2007 at 06:37 AM
A quote from the second link really seal the deal:
"By doing this, you can make the differences between the columns seem more dramatic by shortening the range."
Posted by: Rettaw | Dec 06, 2007 at 11:47 AM
I had trouble looking at the final graph. All those bats -- especially the dark, fat one with the light handle -- looked like corn dogs. Maybe it's because it's lunch time right now, so food is on my mind!
Posted by: Patrick Murphy | Dec 08, 2007 at 01:24 PM
Getting any search engine to translate is tricky, but I really think that Babelfish did well on this occasion.
Posted by: Joanne | May 09, 2011 at 06:41 AM