Sunday, May 13, 2007

Lost in Translation

I occasionally like to have fun with the free online translation services... you know, the ones which can give you a "general gist" of what's being said. I use them often, since I frequently receive e-mail from friends in Haiti who write to me in French.

I thought that tonight, before I hit the hay, I'd take a piece of a famous speech and translate it into Spanish, then take the Spanish translation and feed it back into the translation program changing it to English... sort-of a language feedback loop, if you will... and see if you recognize it. This one's pretty easy, though, so I don't think anyone will have trouble recognizing it:

Permit the ring of the liberty. And when this happens, and when we permit the ring of the liberty - when we permit that it to call of each village and each village, of each state and each city, we will be capable of accelerating that day when all children of God - black men and Jewish, white men and the Genteel, protestant and catholic - will be capable of being taken of the hand and to sing in the words of the spiritual old woman Of the Black one: "Freed at last! Liberate at last! Give thanks to Omnipotent God, we are free at last!"

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