Death is a futon

I received notice yesterday that someone in Japan is now following me on twitter. I decide to back-follow, or return-follow, or whatever the word is, after seeing that they seem to be astronomy related. Plus, cute bunny sketch.

The problem of course, is that I don't read or write Japanese. So when I saw a tweet today that was in Japanese, I went to google to get a translation. This reminded me of playing Translation Tennis, something we used to do way back in undergrad. One of the people I knew at the time wrote a perl script to automate the process with AltaVista. Google makes it easy with a convenient "swap languages" feature. The result:

Initial post: 寒っ。布団から出ると死ぬ
Translation: Going cold. Die and get out of the futon

Tennis results:

• 寒っ。布団から出ると死ぬ
• Going cold. Die and get out of the futon
• 風邪だ。死ぬと、布団から抜け出す
• is cold. And die, get out of bedding
• 寒いです。そして、布団から抜け出す死ぬ
• It's cold. The escape from death futon
• 寒いね。死布団からの脱出
• It's cold. Escape from death futon
• 寒いね。布団から脱出死
• It's cold. Escape death from the futon
• 寒いね。布団からの脱出死
• It's cold. Death out of the futon
• 寒いね。死には、布団の
• It's cold. Death is the futon
• 寒いね。死は、布団です
• It's cold. Death is a futon
• 寒いね。死布団です
• It's cold. Death is a futon

And it's over. Still, nine iterations before convergence isn't bad. Plus: "Death is a futon." That's great.