[guyromm]

Back in 2004 or so, I was building a distributed CMS with the goal of creating artificial "link pyramids" with the purpose of SEO, which was a rather new thing at the time.

Content generation was one of our bottlenecks, and as Google was already rather successful at detecting duplicate content, we were looking for a way to "uniqify" posts that would be used to stuff sites intended for googlebot, but not humans.

One of the methods that worked was taking source English content, running it through Babelfish, the Altavista translator to French, Spanish or German, and then using the same method to translate it back to English.

This resulted in texts that did not make much sense to humans, were full of precisely such "tortured phrases" but which were considered unique by Google.