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Back in the 80s, there was a small piece in Omni magazine where they talked about early machine translation efforts and the phrase, “Out of sight, out of mind,” translated to Russian and back became “Invisible insanity.”

This process gave me “To see, thoughts.”

My writing group’s website was scraped and translated into Chinese for a gambling spam site (I don’t really understand why). There were some oddly poetic bits in the Google translation results for the page that I looked at, my favorite being one member's name, Billy Gee, became Billy Wow.




I heard a different one, the Russian saying "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" returned back as "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten".


I ran "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" through the meat-grinder a few times, till it hit a fixed point at "A group of animals".


"Invisible idiot" is how I remember it.




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