The news that Microsoft has produced a 'messenger speak' translation of Homer's Iliad has been all over the wire services, but is it true? I thought it must be a joke when I first read it... another example of satire being treated as news. But I should have known better. It's Microsoft, after all (they're good at taking great things and making crappier versions of them... sorry, as an Apple user I couldn't resist the obvious joke). So yes, they really did do it... though they only 'translated' the first five books and condensed them down to a few lines each. In other words, it's a cute little publicity stunt, rather than a major linguistic undertaking. I took a couple years of ancient Greek in high school, but never got good enough to read Homeric Greek. But I doubt the pr people at Microsoft bothered to read the original Greek either in order to produce lines like, "Ur right to still be ngry, Anchilles has m’ssed things up 4 da Grks wiv his rage."

Posted by jersey  on  Wed Jun 02, 2004  at  02:13 AM

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