Found in Translation: Patriotic Poetry, Part II

I have taken several famous passages from the United States Constitution and run them repeatedly through Google Translator.  I present them here in verse form.

 

A More Perfect Union (Preamble)
American people
in their ability to protect the U.S. Constitution
welfare for children in public,
system security state and to keep the peace,
could be more perfect union.

The Right Combination (First Amendment)
Freedom of speech
or of Congress
or newspaper religion
or people
do not get the right combination
of passive
or prohibiting the free exercise
and asks the government for redress of the complaint.

 

How These Poems were Constructed

I cut and pasted various pieces of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution into Google Translator.  After entering a piece of text, I then set about translating width= it relentlessly through multiple languages.  I typically translated a document 10-20 different times, never repeating any language during a single document’s translation process.  I always began with the original English text, and always concluded in English to get the text you see here.  Other than the final translation of each piece back into English, I never used English as a translating language during the process.

These documents went through the translation process only once.  The poems you see here are the exact text produced on final translation back into English.  The only modifications were some minor tweaking of punctuation, and approximating free verse by breaking lines of text.

Discover more from The Public Professor

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top