It's language, Jim, but not as we know it

Just how are those extraordinary translations from Chinese into English achieved? 'Story is according to The Pulitzer of the 1998 the Prize cloak-and-dagger work to reorganise, rely on the [to jump out of my world the] [Billy Elliott]', begins the compelling summary of The Hours on the pirate DVD cover. It ends just as mystifyingly: 'But by dint of Virginia is before leaving a life time a period write of cloak-and-dagger [Mrs Dalloway], unexpectedly and oddly affect the destiny ... of three people the ... '

And that's it. If nothing else, we can relate to the part about 'unexpectedly and oddly'. The Chinese version just below this passage reads impeccably, by the way.

Again, browsing through the users' guide to a 'Negative Ioniser' machine, we read: 'At air minus ion few, is able to gas-bored, feel ill, in a bad skin, easy issue sickness. Air minus ion reply cast iron advantage.' How could you possibly resist?

We have all come across them, the unintelligible, impenetrable and frequently hilariously bad translations, but how do the authors arrive at something so utterly bizarre? Does it take time, a free creative spirit and the world's worst dictionary to craft a language so rich, so free and so gibberish? In fact, and quite predictably, it is the work of but a few seconds, and anyone can do it.

The translation engine is free in the basic version - if you want to invest more, you can have considerably better, but this is unlikely to be factored into the business plan of the average DVD pirate - and follows a set of fixed rules. It identifies words and characters, some phrases and, if you're lucky, various syntactical contexts, then throws back precisely what the binary compels it to write.