Software for less plain English

The program WhiteSmoke will ‘enrich’ your English. The demo on the site shows how you can start with a simple sentence like ‘I admire your work’ and finish with a strangely un-English one like ‘I greatly appreciate your complicated work’.

It’s been awarded stars by various software magazines, but then computer freaks like to see software doing something and perhaps care less about the real-world effects of what it does.

(via spam in sci.lang.translation, and via grammar_whores)

6 thoughts on “Software for less plain English

  1. Same with MT. There are always some fools that believe that MT can replace human translators one day. Strangely enough, it’s always some computer or science geek that sings the praises of MT. Professional translators, who know better, just shrug it off (and any similar language-related computer toys).

    Language (as well as translation) is a very complex human activity involving emotions, life experience, intuition, etc. In short, everything that cannot be reduced to 0s and 1s (and never will).

  2. “This educational tool upgrades a basic sentence into a more sophisticated, professional sentence.” Apparently a tool for the kind of “writers” who may think that “sophisticated, professional” = “stuffed full of adjectives.”

  3. Please tell me this is a hoax. Please. I will probably have nightmares tonight, especially after watching the creepy demo on their website.

  4. I hope none of you think I’m advocating this!
    But there is an argument that lawyers think that way – first of all they think what they want to write, and then they convolute it and set it down. Not with software, of course, but wetware.

  5. Far from it. I think your post title says it all. I’m just putting up a screenshot of the creepy kid to scare a few more people…

  6. Most of all I like online versions of them, because they avaliable anywhere, where I can get Internet access, like synonyms dictionary. But I used it too, very helpful for me to understand the meaning of an sentence or phrase. Has a hotkey feature and importantly, it

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