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According to a popular legend, a group of American scientists in the 1960s were hard at work on a new universal translation machine.
It was the height of the Cold War, and the US desperately wanted to develop a computer that could translate from English to Russian and back again. So after months and months of research and testing, a prototype was thought to be ready for use.
On the day of its big unveiling, the computer was given a few sentences and phrases to show off what it could do. But it didn’t quite work out the way everybody had hoped. First, the programmers entered a popular saying from the Bible: “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The computer translated that sentence into Russian, and then took the Russian translation and put it back into English. What was the result? “The vodka is good, but the meat is rancid.” In a similar fashion, the saying “Out of…
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