Today, unwilling to spend the time in an internet cafe it would take to translate an Arabic article I was interested in, I lazily ran that article through Google Translate, expecting to at least get a good chortle out of the pitiful attempt at making sense of Arabic that was to follow. Two minutes later, I began preparing myself for the human race's imminent demise.
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel stalled because Israel is not interested in achieving peace.
He said Assad, who was speaking at a joint news conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without preconditions means that they want to "destroy" the peace process.
"What we discussed today is how to get the peace process impasse it has reached, which we believe to be caused by the main ... the absence of serious Israeli partner who really sought to achieve peace in the Middle East."
Wait... is that... legible? Wasn't it only a year ago when I would try to do something similar with a much simpler language, Spanish, and the program would pull up something that looked less like a professionally written article and more like a Facebook post sprawled on your wall by Eric Dreir at 5:00 in the morning after an especially "thirsty" Thursday?
Truthfully, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where a free-online-translation tool can translate any article in any language, as well or better than a translator, whilst completely avoiding the butchery of the English tongue. (Although on the upside, whoever bears responsibility for the prose of the Twilight books officially just ran out of excuses.) In particular, this new development puts a nail in the coffin of my plan to try to get a job in translation when I return to the States, whenever that fateful day might be. Now that I see what I'm up against, I can only concede defeat. The golden age of humanity is over; the dawn of the machines is on.
(Sorry, Jose, but that means we don't need you anymore.)
Finally, as a reference and a desperate comfort-seeking measure, I tried the same thing with the only other online translation tool I could find that would translate Arabic to English for free. The results eased my mind:
Damascus (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel deadlocked since Israel is interested in peace. He added al-Assad, who was speaking at a joint press conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without conditions mean that it wanted \ "هدم\" of the peace process. He said \ "Today we discussed how to get the peace process of the impasse in which we believe to be caused by statute... The absence of the Israeli partner serious, which seeks to achieve peace in the Middle East."
Is there anything quite like a visit from an old friend?
Damascus (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel deadlocked since Israel is interested in peace. He added al-Assad, who was speaking at a joint press conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without conditions mean that it wanted \ "هدم\" of the peace process. He said \ "Today we discussed how to get the peace process of the impasse in which we believe to be caused by statute... The absence of the Israeli partner serious, which seeks to achieve peace in the Middle East."
Is there anything quite like a visit from an old friend?
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In another tidbit, which I'm not even going to pretend is even tangentially related to the above, I feel I should warn anyone who plans on ever using a Syrian treadmill: don't ever use a Syrian treadmill. Or at the very least, don't turn it on while standing on it, in the expectation that it will be like it's Western counterpart and start at 0 mph, allowing you to increase the pace at your own rate. You see, apparantly, Syrian manufacturers saw fit to save us treadmill users that time and effort by simply starting the mph meter at full blast, the instant you press that little red button. What's a few hundred treadmill-related deaths a day in the name of efficiency?
In another tidbit, which I'm not even going to pretend is even tangentially related to the above, I feel I should warn anyone who plans on ever using a Syrian treadmill: don't ever use a Syrian treadmill. Or at the very least, don't turn it on while standing on it, in the expectation that it will be like it's Western counterpart and start at 0 mph, allowing you to increase the pace at your own rate. You see, apparantly, Syrian manufacturers saw fit to save us treadmill users that time and effort by simply starting the mph meter at full blast, the instant you press that little red button. What's a few hundred treadmill-related deaths a day in the name of efficiency?
And the West thinks it has a stranglehold on ingenuity... Fools.
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