St. Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet, according to an entry in h2g2 (the BBC’s pre-Wikipedia Wikipedia) on Cool patron saints.
Catholic Online has written a prayer for those using the Internet, asking for St Isidore’s intercession:
Almighty and eternal God,
who has created us in Thy image
and bade us to seek after all that is good, true and beautiful,
especially in the divine person
of Thy only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
grant we beseech Thee that,
through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor,
during our journeys through the Internet
we will direct our hands and eyes
only to that which is pleasing to Thee
and treat with charity and patience
all those souls whom we encounter.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
And St. Clare is apparently the patron saint of television:
Before she died in 1253, she became too ill to attend daily mass. As she lay in her bed, she would see visions of the mass on the wall of her cell, just like there was a TV. Pretty cool, huh?
Yes, I’m researching terminology on a Cistercian church.
Hi Margaret,
I’ve also seen this referred to as “round-trip translation.” I think it’s fun; I remember somewhere there was a web interface that would allow you to set the language pairs and number of iterations and it would run your input text through several round trips automatically. Lost the link, though.
I can’t resist pointing out, however, as it’s something of a pet peeve of mine, that babelizing is often used as misplaced criticism of machine translation. While there’s plenty to criticize in machine translation, it’s always struck me as nonsensical to criticize MT for failing to do what we ask human translators to do: why would one ever translate back again?
In other words, the correct comparison for an nth-generation babelization of a source text would be an nth-hand translation and retranslation of that text — which would be very strange and pointless (if interesting).
And besides, in every instance, a one-way translation is more than sufficient to establish that human translators do better than machine translation.