Dick was probably inspired by popular anecdotes of the time (most of them probably embellished or entirely made up) about early efforts at machine translation, in which somebody forward-and-back-translates a common idiom and gets something ridiculous out. "Out of sight, out of mind" becomes "invisible idiot"; "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" becomes "the wine is excellent but the meat is rancid", etc.
His clever correct guess, in my opinion, wasn't so much the part about machine translation as the speculation about what bored office workers in an age of networked computers would do with their time.
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Date: 2007-12-21 02:06 pm (UTC)His clever correct guess, in my opinion, wasn't so much the part about machine translation as the speculation about what bored office workers in an age of networked computers would do with their time.