It's All Greek to Me

I found a wonderful website that has me playing with it for hours. It is Babelfish and can be found at world.altavista.com

You type in a phrase or word and get it translated into another language. That's fun. But here is the really great part. Then use the newly translated text and type that in again and translate it back to English. Here's an example:

If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat.

I translated it into Greek and then back into English.

Here's what I got:

If sprayed when tinkle I pray are takes care of to you and they clean up the center

You gotta love it!

How I Would Use This
Really I would let my participants play with this. In a workshop on communication and miscommunication it would be fun to challenge them to try doing this very exercise for homework or in a break and bringing the results back to the class.
I am sure many people would try to figure out which languages are the worst for re-translation.

My point would be that we cannot take everything people say literally, but need to look for the hidden meanings.