Thanks to Will Benton I'm having a Translation Party: type in a phrase and the site translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until "achieves equilibrium" — that is, you get the same output every time. Sometimes that happens quickly, sometimes not at all. This yields something interesting: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Also the first sentence of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.”
It gives up on this one: “And malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.”
On this one (a line from Richard Wilbur) it seeks simplification: “The sky became a still and woven blue.”
With this one it says it has achieved equilibrium when it really hasn’t: “I repose by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors” (Whitman). And here's a party waiting to happen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Hmmm…this
http://www.samueljohnson.com/ouch.html#1512
becomes
http://translationparty.com/#1193085
I jammed it with "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive."
I am proud of Matt and deeply offended by what tickletext discovered.
I tried Dylan's line "You're an idiot, babe, it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe." Check it:
http://translationparty.com/#1198206
This is my favorite so far:
http://translationparty.com/#1238727
Stephen Fry would like this one:
http://translationparty.com/#1241255
It choked on "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York", but the final rendering in English was kind of poignant:
"In the winter of discontent, the summer is the glory of New York."