The "Cakes of MRE do not matter"

As I mentioned a little while back, I'm reading a book called Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter, which is, among a lot of other things, about the joys and difficulties of language translation. The particular section I'm reading now talks about how things change when translated from one language into another (or into several different languages in succession, like an interlingual game of "telephone"), and about what kinds of differences you see when they're then translated back into the original language. In this same chapter, he also makes some very dismissive comments about the concept (or at least the current state) of machine translation.

All of which gave me an idea for an vaguely entertaining thing to do: I ran my last blog post through Babelfish, "translating" it from English to Spanish, and then back into English. I hereby present the highly amusing results:

The "Cakes of MRE do not matter"

There are uniform ventilators of Farscape in Afghanistan! It sees, cancelling the demonstration is not right travesty, is downright unpatriotic! The right glance in all those soliders poor, having to leave and to face minefields without uniform consolation of having its demonstration of the favorite TV to watch...

Yeah, I think Hofstader's pretty much right on the money as regards the state of machine translation...