The infinite pleasure of machine translation
Gary Stix, in his March 2006 Scientific American article The Elusive Goal of Machine Translation, writes:
Natrium Nepal Asia legend: The lion, the sorceress, the evil spirit wardrobe "already lack" the evil spirit abstains the trilogy "rich in poetic and artistic flavor, also has not let" the Harley baud "the series novel have the infinite pleasure the undercurrent to be turbulent.
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The preceding gibberish was brought to you by a Chinese-to-English translation carried out by Altavista's Babelfish, the popular Internet-based translator. In coherent English, from a bilingual page on the Web site of Taiwan's China Post, it reads:
"The Chronicles of Narnia" doesn't come near the poetic vision of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and it doesn't have the dark undercurrents that makes the "Harry Potter" series endlessly fascinating.
This reminds me of an email in English that I once received from a Russian programmer, and not having the slightest idea what it said. And I know Russian! Moral of the story: if you want a human to read it, have a human write it.