Hi, Hilmar.

>Talking about translation - recently I read a story, in the news, about a German city printing 7000 copies of a pamphlet for tourism. They decided to save translation costs, and use an on-line translation service - with the result that the resulting translation was "rendered useless", and they had to re-do the printing.

Well, that's why translation is a craft (I wouldn't call it an art). I translated once a nice short story from Damon Knight that involved a dead poet and a slight mistery around her last sonet. It was actually an achrostic (the initial letter of each verse, read vertically, formed a phrase) that finally was the key to solve the mistery.

I struggled to translate the poem AND the hidden phrase. The first problem was that this phrase, once translated, didn't matched in lengh with the number of verses, and so it should have 14 verses.

I ended up using a different phrase that had the same meaning on the context of the story and rewrote the poem much in the same way. It was one of the hardest things I translated in my life, but at least I was recognized by several people around the world for that.

I think that the day Artificial Intelligence reach that point, I'll retire. 8-)

Regards,