What prompted me was the implausible Google Translate of the fourth "sentence" of Lorem ipsum,Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis from "Latin" into "This helps us prevent automated submissions". Discovering this in a bogus Yahoo News story, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-upbeat/cum-sociis-natoque-penatibus-et-magni... made me think Yahoo had hacked Google Translate into believing this highly idiomatic interpretation. But G-Ting that English back into "Latin" nearly recovers the Lorem ipsum, which then loops. And the first "sentence", "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit", G-Ts to "This page is half the battle WIN!" Shame on me for imagining Yahoo pulling one on Google. --rwg Mitchell Riley>Here is a site that does English <-> Japanese until a fixed point is found. http://www.translationparty.com/ When we found the site a few years ago, my friend discovered that "Naruto" expanded forever. The step from English to Japanese would give the word both in English and Japanese, so the total length doubled each round trip. The translator isn't fooled by that any more. It looks like it's very nearly fooled by "Naruto Naruto", after a few doublings it is ended by the strange appearance of some other word. On 3 March 2013 00:29, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote: A offline comment by Bill G. prompted me to think about the following problem: Let gt(x) be "Google translate" of some corpus x from some language D into some language R. Let gt^-1(y) be the "Google translate" of y in the language R back to the language D. Let rt(x) by the "round trip" translate of x in D to R and back to D. What are the fixed points of rt(x) ? They obviously imply fixed points of gt(rt(x)). It would be interesting to build a simple process to grab some random text from the web & see if rt^n(x) converges to a fixed point for some n. What types of phrases might cause rt^n(x) to "explode" without bound? Are there any "implosions", where rt^n(x) becomes empty? Are there cycles, such that rt^n(x) never converges, but rt^(n+m)(x)=rt^n(x) for some m and for all n>some p ? For a given language, and a word w within that language, there must exist at least one comprehensible sentence containing that word w. Determine the fixed points for each of these sentences.