More on instant translation

[asakiyume]

Wakanomori shared a PDF of this (probably paywalled) article from the Atlantic, "The Costs of Instant Translation," by Ross Benjamin. This guy expresses so eloquently a lot of what I was reaching for in this post.

First, he talks about his stumbling attempts to communicate when first he had a scholarship to Germany, right out of college. He's struggling to say things and to understand what others are saying to him:

As the night went on, I began to enjoy a peculiar freedom in being cut off from the full range of my native eloquence. Thrown back on reduced resources, I had to reach for blunter, more elemental means of expression. Without the usual layers of tact and verbal finesse—those elaborate structures that so often serve as buffers against self-exposure—I found myself speaking with a rawness that was both humbling and unexpectedly exhilarating.

Later that night, as I lay on my mattress atop the makeshift loft in my sublet, words and snatches of sentences whirled through my head, and with them came a kind of euphoria—the sense of my mind being shunted onto new tracks.

And he contrasts the challenge of learning a new language with the frictionlessness of instant translation, referencing Bad Bunny:

When Bad Bunny hosted the Saturday Night Live season premiere last month, he addressed the backlash by delivering part of his monologue in Spanish. Then he told the audience that if they didn’t understand what he’d just said, they had four months to learn. The provocation was at once playful and serious—a way of challenging his audience to stretch toward him rather than accommodating them. Bad Bunny and Apple may be partners in the Superbowl, but in a sense they are offering two opposing models of cross- linguistic encounter: One invites people to struggle with another language, to inhabit something unfamiliar; the other sells them the promise of bypassing that effort entirely.

His concluding paragraphs are just beautiful:

Cultural critics have long warned that our media-and-technology ecosystem conditions us to treat language as purely instrumental —a neutral conduit for shuttling information from point A to point B. But anyone who has lived between languages knows it is never only that. Each language carries its own map of the world. What resists smooth transmission isn’t an obstacle to communication, but part of its meaning and texture. Automatic-translation technology, by design, filters out that surplus as noise.

As a literary translator, I’m drawn to precisely that which defies easy equivalence: rhythm, play, idiosyncrasy, cultural specificity, the shimmer of ambiguity. My work happens where languages don’t line up, where meaning must be reimagined rather than decoded and flattened. What I fear is that people will come to think of language as only what machines can translate, forgetting everything outside that frame. If technology promises to end the language barrier, we should ask: What else will it erase?

I'm not a literary translator, but I definitely am drawn by the cultural specificity of languages, the "shimmer of ambiguity," as Benjamin puts it. The creation, together, of meaning when the languages don't line up.

P.S. If the article is indeed paywalled and you'd like to read the whole thing, and if you're willing to share your email, you can message me and I'll email it to you.

P.P.S. Bonus: the part of his SNL monologue where Bad Bunny goes into Spanish

Comments

[cmcmck]

I tend to enjoy working my own poetical translations out of French and Italian as I do find so many seem very mechanical to me (I suspect done via translation software) and as a poet myself, that's not what I want.

[asakiyume]

Yes, you want a living translation, not a mechanical one!

[sovay]

Each language carries its own map of the world. What resists smooth transmission isn’t an obstacle to communication, but part of its meaning and texture. Automatic-translation technology, by design, filters out that surplus as noise.

I know it changed the way I write in English to be at one point in my life conversant in about five languages (and not totally bereft of any of them at this point, just out of practice). None of it was noise. It was all value.

[asakiyume]

Oh absolutely. Thinking about things from different linguistic perspectives. Sapir-Whorf I think is bunk, but different perspectives are not.

And that the **difficulty** is part of the value. That friction is valuable. That grappling with difference is valuable.

[lizvogel]

While machine translation can have wonderful applications -- I've seen people use it in real-time to communicate with a non-English-speaking in-law, for example -- it should always and only be a tool, that you can pick up when you want it and put down when you don't.

It is never a substitute for real human judgement. Like so many things these days, this seems to be another push to remove any hint of effort from people's lives -- as though actually having to work at something is some kind of plague to be wiped out, not one of the fundamental things that makes us human.

[asakiyume]

as though actually having to work at something is some kind of plague to be wiped out, not one of the fundamental things that makes us human. --What a perfect way of putting it. Yes, this.

[mallorys_camera]

I love the snippets from The Atlantic article, and yes, I'd like to read the piece in its entirety.

[asakiyume]

I'll send it to you!

[sartorias]

Noting for when our copy arrives...though it might take a long time to read it since I'm already the choir. (I tend to gravitate more to articles when there is a question in my mind. No question here!)

[asakiyume]

I understand what you mean. For me, I was excited to see someone putting my feelings into different words, if you know what I mean, and in doing so, illuminating slightly different facets. But yeah, I'm obviously the choir as well!

[rimturse]

I've seen some pretty atrocious auto subtitles. The worst was "We're out here, busting our asses." which in Danish translated to "We're out here, blowing up (as in exploding) our donkeys."

But reading your older post, I agree completely. And I also immediately thought of the Darmok, because we are losing out on how culture shapes a language. Like there is no English equivalent of the Danish word "unde" ("gönnen" in German), and even the English explanations of the word tend to not get the emotion and mindset behind it quite right. Similarly, Danish doesn't have an word for "procrastination".

And that's all before mentioning the studies of how bilingual people literally think differently, depending on the language they're speaking.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, having multiple languages to draw on is like being able to see in more dimensions--wonderful.