6:33 PM me: i waas thinking about how one goes about aligning parallel text
  and something occurred to me
  not a technique realy, just a way to think abou tit
  er, about it.
6:34 PM i do think about tit on a regular basis, but don't we all?
  you know thos little circular dna virus thingies
 friend: uh... well... i'm not sure i want to discuss this RIGHT HERE :)
 me: i can't remember the name
  plasmids?
  (hehe, okay, sorry ;) )
 friend: not sure i rememer those.... but what about htem?
6:35 PM me: o right plasmids
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid
  they are jsut circular dna strands
  and it occurred to me, that it's sort of interseting to think about a text like that
  and then
  if you think of the transaltion of the text as a concentric circle
  scaled to fit
6:36 PM meh, i need inkscapeto explain it
  but i'm on my eee
  anyway the upshot is
  suppose you have an english text and a spanish text
6:37 PM and you represent each word with a little square (like a letter of dna), and then you squish the spanish (which will be longer) down to the same length as the english
 me: and then wrap them around the clock
 friend: ok
6:43 PM but why round?
  most texts aren't circular
 me: yeah they're not it's just a useful way to explain the next bit:
  you do the same thing iwth the spanish (say) translation
  adjusting font size so it fits too
  then
  you can say things like
6:44 PM "the word 'fish' occurred at 4:30, and 7 in english"
 friend: ok
 me: it's easy to understand
  then
  you can say
  the word "pez" (i think that's the es word... sigh)
  occurred at 4 and 7:45
6:45 PM so maybe that's the right word
 friend: so you could measure uh... relative elasticity ?
  of language ?
 me: i think it gets across teh idea pretty quickly
 friend: text length?
 me: no the idea is
  you figure out these distributions for the whole text
  every word on both sides
  certain words will occur maybe every 2 minutes (say), like "and" and "y"
6:46 PM friend: ok
 me: but some words might occur just three or four times
  and if they have similar "timings"
  they might be the same word.
  i'ts nothing new, it's a standard thing. just like the explanation
  it's easy to picture