Felix and David built the Generate Javascript program for fun. We wanted to play with sentence structure, and we especially wanted to play with some of the powerful libraries that are on the Web for generating new ideas.
If you've read through the Javascript, you can see most of how it works. The generate code first makes up a paragraph. Part of this paragraph is turned into the title; it's called the lede in the code, because it's more like a lede in journalism than like a real, edited title. A few words from the paragraph are fed into an image-search engine. We used Google image search for a while, and it had good image results. We tried the Live Search api, and that had much simpler formatting options, so that's our current implementation. It's fun for us to try different search services, and we like comparing them.
The paragraph gets translated back and forth from English to a series of other languages. We use about 20 of the languages that the translation service has available -- Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Catalan, and many others. In each sequence of back-and-forth translations, we just use a few, and the selection is random. If you look at more and more of the translation sequences, you see better and worse translations.
We tried for a bit to go from English, the generated paragraph's language, to language B, then to C, then to D. This would be the most interesting game of telephone, of course. But we cannot find a translation engine that is even close to supporting this well for a lot of languages. The best service that we can use convieniently seems to be Google, through their Web translation API. It is definitely better between English and language X than it is between language X and Y. If you know of a really good translation engine between two languages, please tell us; it would be swell to have a specialized ko-ja or it-ru engine, and we can make it work.
Sometimes the search- and image engines generate results that people find profane. Felix and I think this is funny, and we hope you do. If you are offended, we are sorry. Let us know what you think generated the offense -- we can tweak.
That's it so far -- well, that's all in the about. Let us know if you have comments or ideas.