New York, NY -- (SBWire) -- 07/19/2010 -- "Everyone can cheat often silly." So sayeth Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, a man often more well-regarded for his powerful oratory skills than his post-modern sense of humor. Don't recognize his words? That's because they've been translated from English to 54 different languages and back again using Funny Translator, a new website from the language specialists of ConveyThis and Translation Services USA in New York.

Lincoln's true quote, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time," were pasted into the text field at FunnyTranslator.com and translated from English to Afrikaans, back to English and then to Arabic, to English again then to Belarusian, and so on in this fashion until, hundreds of translations later, it mutated into the slightly less inspiring, but certainly more humorous, "Everyone can cheat often silly." Truly words to live by.

Funny Translator is a rapidly-growing new web project by two New York City-based language teams: Translation Services USA, a major translation agency, and the programmers of ConveyThis, an on-the-fly website translation widget. Every day, thousands of new users visit the site to twist phrases, sayings, song lyrics—whatever the case may be—with Funny Translator's surprisingly-bad translation service, which can then be tweeted and shared on Facebook for the amusement of friends. The results are always bad, often humorous, and occasionally even surprisingly insightful or ironic, such as when a user evidently entered "I wish i was cool," and, 56 translations later, the site spat out: "I pray for you."

The project was started "to emphasize how bad machine translation is," according to Translation Services USA president and CEO Alex Buran, who, along with the team behind ConveyThis, began Funny Translator in June 18, 2010 as "Bad Translator." By revealing the limitations of automated translation services such as Google Translator and Yahoo! Babel Fish, the hope is to promote the need for high-quality, human translations for important texts such as legal documents, corporate websites, and instruction manuals.

But regardless of the intent, the fact is that Funny Translator is just a fun way to kill time. Particularly-amusing translations can be submitted instantly for public display, where they are then voted on by visitors, with the funniest translations are ranked and listed as such. Site administrators occasionally post favorite mistranslations to the site's Facebook fan page (which has already gathered a following of nearly 4,000 users) and to their "Best Of" email newsletter, which can be optionally subscribed to from the site.

As Sir Francis Bacon might say, "Information - force. Information pistol / I know the campaign."

Funny translator can be found on the web at: http://www.FunnyTranslator.com/