Super Editors, Part II : Google Poetry

Hate online translators? You'll hate this one more.

An article in The Guardian recently claimed Google will expand it's translation operations to new heights: translating poetry.

When I first heard about this, I had to find out more. So I Googled it.

Damn.

I came across this Guardian article, and man was I relieved. 

At first, I thought Google was going to figure out the meaning of every poem. (Wouldn't that be something?) 

Luckily enough, all Google is trying to do is translate poetry from one language to another, which proposes a yin-yang of poetic hopes and woes. 

Admittedly, I don't write much poetry because I'm terrible at it. Most novelists think poets are lazy writers, but trust me, that's not always the case. The write things that sound interesting, yet I can never seem to figure them out. I guess that might be the point, and what I loved most about my poetry workshops were the arguments. Some discussions tended to ignite within a matter of seconds. Who knows the meaning besides the poet, anyway? 

But I digress.

In another battle for the title of Super Editor, major Internet players are fighting to translate everything. 

This is good because they might actually hire some people to translate the poems, and researching foreign poems won't be a strenuous.

This is bad because the prestige of being a book/poetry translator might disintegrate. Also - Have you ever come across a bad web-translation,like, perhaps, when you cheated your way through Spanish class? Imagine what such an oops could do to the message of a poem.  

Maybe I'll start writing in Simlish and see how Google handles that.

How do you feel about this?

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Things You Might Like to Read:

Super Editor, Part I
Writing News
Writing Drunk