Posted by noa on May 7, 2004, at 18:01:08
In reply to Re: Spoc's story becomes found poetry » noa, posted by spoc on May 6, 2004, at 10:10:05
I am not so talented, just a little twisted, I think.
Here is how I got the poem:
I copied and pasted all of the German text from your post. Then I used the translator function several times to go from and to several languages. I forget the sequence, but it involved German, of course, and some English (twice I believe) as well as french and Spanish (or maybe it was Italian, I can't remember) and I think somewhere in there was a round of Dutch.
At certain points, the translation itself was hilarious!! And at one point some of it was, well, patently OBSCENE! (Sorry, I edited that stuff out).
OK, so then I started just cutting out words here and there to try to see if I could get a story that would make some sense and be entertaining or maybe meaningful. But it was hard to get a good syntax going, as you might imagine, after these translation permutations.
So, I decided to keep editing out words, and then add some punctuation, and get a poem. But I did not move any words out of sequence, and I didn't add any new ones.
It was kind of fun!
I haven't written on the writing board. But you know? It might be fun to do this as a writing game on the writing board. Take a mundane text, translate it at least 4 times using at least 4 languages, and then edit it by just deleting words and adding punctuation (no moving words or adding words) and make a story or a poem.
poster:noa
thread:340747
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040507/msgs/344505.html