Google Translate

[su_liam]

Sadly, even the google translator can only output pinyin. I don't know of anything to convert a string of pinyin into Chinese. Or English, for that matter...

[Coyotemax]

This is fun, uses google translation. It uses japanese but i'm sure a chinese one could be made easily.

http://translationparty.com/

as an example, using one of the quotes from su liam's sig... 50 iterations gives this:
Common interest, two of the three legs 122,121, all my hair, good and evil, good and evil, the story of the battle of the three-foot high resistance.

[mearrin69]

That looks like some kind of very (VERY!1!) odd poetry.

Turning pinyin into characters (or English) is a rough thing even if you've got tones. Unless you've got a lot of context (like two character combos instead of single characters: chengshi instead of cheng or shi alone) it's hard to tell what the heck a phrase is saying. Your prancing ponies thing is the perfect example; I can't make heads nor tails of it. That stuff from Firefly is even worse for me because most of the pronunciation on the show was so poor. You know the poem about forty-four wet stone lions? Sishisi shi shi shizi or whatever it is...my teachers had trouble telling it to us. Makes She sells seashells seem like child's play.
M

[su_liam]

"Bilbo. Birubobaginzu. Adventures of all these small bits of gray-ho."

Was it maybe thinking, "greyest little Hobbit?"

A long time ago, I translated, "This is my lovely fiancé, Stephanie," into French and back. It was mostly gibberish with the word, "fianc," and a randomly-located acute accent.
On this site it reached equilibrium at, "This is good for me Fiansesutefani."

The more things change...

[su_liam]

Exactly, Andartar. Anybody sees a flaw in my German, well... it ain't German, it's Tarkensprach or whatever.

In science fiction worlds set in the future it's harder. German represents... German. Still, Google Translate is probably better than anything I, a decidedly monolingual individual, is going to create. Still anybody who complains about my poor naming is directed to examine, "Nous Voila," in a professional game publication(2300AD).

In any case, I'm still pretty impressed by the progress that has been made in machine translation. It's not that the dog talks well, it's that he talks at all!

[su_liam]

Oh happy day! I was messing with Google Translate today and found a small happy change. It now does transliteration for Arabic. It's an odd transliteration, but it's workable. Now for a Hebrew transliteration...

Part of the problem with Romanization schemes is that for most languages, no standard exists. For Chinese we have Pinyin, Wade-Giles and a few dozen freak schemes. For Arabic there's nothing, just whatever freak scheme a given author pulled out of his... mind.

Babel. What some call gibberish, others call freedom.