One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, since his mother was Danish, and he, as a child, had lived in Denmark. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening's chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it.

He pulls [a notebook] down--it's from the late 1950s. Ever since he was a teenager, he has captured some 10,000 examples of swapped syllables ("hypodeemic nerdle"), malapropisms ("runs the gambit"), "malaphors" ("easy-go-lucky"), and so on, about half of them committed by Hofstadter himself. He makes photocopies of his notebook pages, cuts them up with scissors, and stores the errors in filing cabinets and labeled boxes around his study.

As a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind's subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. When I look at an article in Russian, I say, "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode." Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: "No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Having devoted one unforgettably intense year of my life to translating Alexander Pushkin's sparkling novel in verse Eugene Onegin into my native tongue (that is, having radically reworked that great Russian work into an English-language novel in verse), I find this remark of Weaver's far more congenial than his earlier remark, which reveals a strangely simplistic view of language.