Who'd be a translator? By day you struggle with the German for "babbitt-lined bearing" (Weißmetallfutterlager, of course), by night you worry how you'll pay the bills. Online translation services such as Babel Fish may not be able to match you for nuance and naturalness, but they're a) instant, b) improving and c) free, free, free.
And now their creators are eyeing up the poetry market. According to Dmitriy Genzel, a Google software engineer, the internet's favourite one-stop shop is now working on the machine-translation of not just words, but meter and rhyme.
Remember Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem Jabberwocky? In 1931 the New Yorker's Frank L Warrin came up with a fantastic French version, Le Jaseroque. Here's what Google's existing offering, Google Translate, came up with when we asked it to turn that back into English:
It wabe: the toves lubricilleux
Gimble twisting in the guava.
Mimsy were the gougebosqueux
And mômerade horsgrave.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, avoids
The Band frumieux to take!"
