Provenance
- Languages
- English → Russian → English
- Source
- Repeated in textbooks, lectures and press coverage; no primary account located
- Source date
- 1960
- Verification
- apocryphalWidely repeated. No primary source has been found.
- Mechanism
- Unestablished — no system has been identified
Input
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak
Mechanism
Unestablished — no system has been identified
Inference
Printed
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten
Observed
The story goes that an early machine translation system was given
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak
translated it into Russian, translated it back, and produced
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten
This entry is apocryphal, and that is its function#
No account of this story names the system that produced it. None gives a date beyond a decade. None cites a person who was in the room, and the round-trip procedure it describes was not a normal way to demonstrate a translation system in the period it is attributed to.
It is held here as apocryphal: widely repeated, no primary source found. The course does not drop it, because a corpus that quietly deletes what it cannot source teaches the opposite of what this one is for.
What would change this record#
A contemporaneous document — a report, a memo, a photograph of a printout — naming the system and the date. Week 3’s bench exists to look for one. Every year the chain has stopped in the same place, and that stopping point is itself the finding.
Why it survives anyway#
Because it is a good joke and because it flatters the teller: it says that machines are stupid in a way people are not. That is worth noticing in a room full of people about to write down what they think a machine did.