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Tech

Welcome to the Black Hole of Language

Recursive good times with Translation Party.

All Translation Party is is this: enter a phrase into the box and, using Bing's translation engine, the site changes it from English to Japanese. Then, from that translation, it translates again back to English and from that translation back to Japanese—and so on until it reaches an equilibrium point where the translation converges on a single phrase that's the same in both languages. Or, much more rarely, the phrase sails off into the depths of the universe, never reaching equilibrium. I suppose this could seem dumb and/or boring if you're not into math or language, but it's worth thinking about it a bit.

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@everydayelk