From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2010-10-05T13:50:10+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] matz_en and matz_transrated twitter accounts

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On 10/04/2010 09:02 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> Many of you probably follow the matz_translated Twitter account, provided by
> tera.cc via the translate-twitter application:
>
> http://twitter.com/matz_translated<http://twitter.com/#!/matz_translated>
>
> This is a neat idea in terms of trying to allow English speakers who don't
> understand Japanese to read Matz's (and many other core Ruby developers')
> tweets. However, it uses the Bing Translator which, uhh, well, isn't great.
> However, this makes for some unintentionally hilarious bad translations, and
> I'm sure plenty of people just follow matz_translated for ironic value.
>
> I thought I'd try to solve the problem of poor translations and exacerbate
> the problem of unintentionally ironic translations in one fell swoop. So
> announcing the matz_en and matz_transrated Twitter accounts:
>
> http://twitter.com/matz_en<http://twitter.com/#!/matz_en>  (Serious)
> http://twitter.com/matz_transrated<http://twitter.com/#!/matz_transrated>
>   (Silly)
>
> The service is extremely simple and modern, based on the tweetstream gem
> (which lets you follow users via the Twitter streaming API), the rsay gem
> (wraps the Google Translate API), and the twitter_oauth gem. The matz_en
> account translates the original yukihiro_matz account from Japanese into
> English using the Google Translate service. The matz_transrated account
> takes the Bing translation output of matz_translated, and round trips it
> back to Japanese and English again via the Google Translate API for an
> additional degree of Engrishness.
>
> So how well does matz_en perform in terms of good translations and
> matz_transrated in terms of hilarious Engrish? The results are generally
> good but sometimes a bit mixed. With matz_en, I notice the Google Translate
> API at least manages to produce non-broken English most of the time, even if
> the meaning is lost somewhat. Bing seems notoriously bad at producing
> broken-sounding Engrish. This makes matz_transrated a bit strange as it
> generally produces better English than matz_translated, even though the
> meaning is often completely skewed. One thing I definitely noticed was
> matz_translated has escaping problems in mobile clients (at least Twitter
> for iPhone) which matz_en does not and matz_transrated actually corrects.
>
> The code is so simple that it would be extremely easy for me to add
> additional Ruby core developers who tweet in Japanese or additional output
> languages. Right now it weighs in at 42 (!!!) loc, and that's with all the
> credentials hardcoded into the Ruby code itself. I might factor the
> credentials out into a YAML file and publish the source on github if
> anyone's interested.
>
>    

Hrm...

>
> Write Lua programs to be confusing because I like Ruby solder.
> 43 minutes ago <http://twitter.com/matz_en/status/26424331490> via 
> Matz Translator <http://twitter.com/matz_en>


Confusing alright.

Like the idea, though.

-Justin

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