So, down to the final hour, I have finished everything. Essentially what I did for my project was to take several of the more popular Aesop's Fables and scramble them using the Babelfish translation software. Then, upon having done this, I realized that it really wouldn't be very interesting to just take this scrambled text and slap it onto my website. I decided I would make it into a mini flash animation. So I went online and got a free trial of a flash editor. However when I opened the editor I realized I had never used flash before and had no idea what I was doing. So after a few hours of teaching myself flash I was done. It probably could have been better and looked prettier, and really I could have most likely done the exact same thing in Microsoft Power Point... At least I learned something new, eh?
So the sources were really not as hard to find as I thought. The Fables were on About.com, translated and made available in public domain. The Mozart came from Musopen.com, a good source for PD music. The flash editor is only a free trial, but as long as that stupid flashing watermark is up in the top left corner it's okay to publish things with it. The scrambling was courtesy a free text translation service called Babelfish that AltaVista allows everyone to use. The stories I used were The Boy who Cried Wolf, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Hare and the Tortoise.
I guess the purpose of this, other than cheap laughs and pointing out the flaws in translation software, is to show how different languages can be from each other, even if they have the same roots. The two languages I used, French and Spanish, are touted as 'romance languages.' This grouping implies some similarity, but translate some text too many times and you begin to lose coherency. On the other hand, the message of the fable usually remains intact, showing that such messages can indeed cross over multiple languages, repeatedly...
Anyway, enjoy the animation!
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