When you scare all your friends off with your little crazy experiments, try it on yourself - just stop suddenly and think what your sentence three sentences ago was, verbatim. I’ve tried many times, and always got a negative result (and a stare of incomprehension to go with it!). In the off-chance that you get a correct response, as rare as that is, next time ask you interlocutor to repeat verbatim the third sentence back from where you stop them. (You might want to wear a wire in order to confirm!).

Chances are, they will remember the “pure meaning” of what they said, but not verbatim how they said it. When you are in the middle of a conversation or discussion with someone, stop them and ask them to repeat verbatim the previous sentence they’ve just said. If you, like David Bellos, think that human translators store sentences they’ve already translated, try this little experiment. David Bellos has an article in The Independent (actually an extract from his book Is That A Fish In Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything), “How Google Translate Works,” that makes some interesting points but also has some problems, which Asya Pereltsvaig has dealt with in a post at her blog Languages of the World.

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