Spanish/English Debate About Liquid Nitrogen

[nemorathwald]

Cory Doctorow blogged about the video of liquid nitrogen being thrown in the swimming pool at Penguicon, and ever since, many of the comments to the video on YouTube have been debating whether it was faked with dry ice. Most of the comments are in Spanish, so I've been carrying on the debate bilingually with the help of Altavista's Babelfish. Fortunately, one fotografía is worth a thousand words.

Here's a tip I've learned while using this method to correspond internationally: When you translate your own text into another language, translate the result back into English to see if it's been garbled.

Comments

[atdt1991.livejournal.com]

That's majorly neat!

[http://users.livejournal.com/jer_/]

Wow, it's actually cooler to see it on the video than it was to see it at Penguicon... I'm alot closer, and the effect is easier to see. Very cool

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

I don't have a YouTube account, and I don't want to make one just to argue with these guys -- but you should probably tell them just how close the hotel room was to the pool, so they know he didn't have to carry it very far. I think one of them is suggesting that his hands should have been frozen from carrying it.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

Babelfish is a pretty handy tool for reading other languages, but I wouldn't use it to try to intentionally communicate to other people. Spanish is a very simple language, but some words don't mean the same thing and some words have multiple meanings.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

That's why translating the result back to English works so well.

[phecda.livejournal.com]

I know you like a good argument, and I'm amused that you've done so bi-lingually. :-)

I would suggest telling some of these hombres that if they doubt the film they should get some LN2 and toss it into a large body of water to see what it does rather than call it a fake simply because "el tio" is not wearing protective equipment. ;-)

[brendand.livejournal.com]

I think you should translate it back into English to see how BADLY it's been garbled.

[(Anonymous)]

I was at Penguicon, so I know this wasn't faked, but if it was.... Man, what a fake! You somehow turned dry ice into a liquid?!? :-)