Translating myself #18: The (translation) ghost in the machine -- PLUS a sneak preview for readers!
“Machine translation will displace only those humans who translate like machines, humans will focus on tasks that require intelligence.”
Arle Richard Lommel, language technologist
Hello.
Today, as promised in the first of these newsletters, I have some exclusive content to share – read on to find out what it is.
A few weeks ago a fellow translator asked on Twitter what I thought about employing machine translation for works of literature. She was reacting to an article published by the Goethe Institut, which sumarised some of the ways in which artificial intelligence can assist literary translators.
I am generally sceptical about the use of artificial intelligence in translating a work of fiction or literary non-fiction. The nuances of tone, the infinite intricacies of language (both in the source and the target), the weight of context and subtext, the quirks of style – all the things that make literary language rich and compelling – are inevitable casualties.
I was reminded of the story of the linguists who translated a well-known line from one of the Gospels into Russian, and then had it re-translated into English, using some form of machine translation:
“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”
emerged, when translated into Russian and then back into English, as:
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.
You see the problem.
This is a funny (perhaps apocryphal?) anecdote, but machine (mis)translation can have some serious real-world consequences.
In one of its recent issues, the current affairs weekly The Economist made some scathing criticisms of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, citing corruption in his government and a disastrous handling of the pandemic. The article ended by saying that Brazilians would soon have an opportunity to “vote him out” of office – a reference to forthcoming elections.
The Brazilian Ministry of Communications (no less!) objected publicly to the article, claiming that it was inciting Brazilians to kill their president. This was puzzling to many observers.
It was not long, however, before someone figured out what had happened. Government officials had run the English-language article through Google Translate. Rather than appearing to encourage Brazilians to vote their president out of office, the resulting Portuguese translation was, officials concluded, a thinly veiled invitation to homicide.
This sounds like a tall tale. But reader – it is true! I typed The Economist‘s text into Google Translate:
“the most urgent priority is to vote him out.”
And sure enough, it appeared in Portuguese as:
“a prioridade mais urgente é eliminá-lo.”
Which many literal-minded Brazilian readers (or willfully misleading politicians) will have understood as:
“the most urgent priority is to eliminate him.”
You see the problem.
*
Despite translational mishaps such as this one, I have continued to wonder about the value of machine translation. After all, artificial intelligence is now capable of identifying patterns and repetitions in an author’s book, and reproduce them in the target language.
Might this be a useful time-saving tool, particularly in the creation of first drafts, which tend to need considerable refinement anyway? What better way to understand the value of a machine translation tool than to put it to the test – with the very novel I have just translated?
Here, then, are the opening lines of Dulce Maria Cardoso’s Violeta Among the Stars.
First, in Portuguese:
inesperadamente
não devia ter saído de casa, não devia ter saído de casa, não devia ter saído de casa, durante algum tempo, segundos, horas, não sou capaz de mais nada,
inesperadamente paro
a posição em que me encontro, de cabeça para baixo, suspensa pelo cinto de segurança, não me incomoda, o meu corpo, estranhamente, não me pesa, o embate deve ter sido violento, não me lembro, abri os olhos e estava assim, de cabeça para baixo, os braços a bater no tejadilho, as pernas soltas, o desacerto de um boneco de trapos, os olhos a fixarem‐se, indolentes, numa gota de água parada num pedaço de vidro vertical, não consigo identificar os barulhos que ouço, recomeço, não devia ter saído de casa, não devia ter saído de casa,
são tão maçadoras as lengalengas
Here is the result of putting that very same text through Google Translate:
unexpectedly
I shouldn’t have left the house, I shouldn’t have left the house, I shouldn’t have left the house, for a while, seconds, hours, I’m not capable of anything else,
I stop unexpectedly
the position I’m in, upside down, suspended by the seat belt, doesn’t bother me, my body, strangely, doesn’t weigh me down, the clash must have been violent, I don’t remember, I opened my eyes and he was like that, upside down, his arms hitting the roof, his legs loose, the misstep of a rag doll, his eyes staring idly at a drop of water standing on a piece of vertical glass, I can’t identify the noises I hear, I start again, I shouldn’t have left the house, I shouldn’t have left the house,
the spiels are so boring
And here is my final version:
suddenly
I should have stayed at home, I should have stayed at home, I should have stayed at home, for some time, seconds, hours, I can do nothing,
suddenly I stop
the position I’m in, head down, hanging by the seatbelt, not uncomfortable, strangely my body does not weigh me down, it must have been a hard crash, I opened my eyes and found myself like this, head down, arms resting on the car’s ceiling, legs dangling, the awkwardness of a rag doll, eyes fixed, listless, on a drop of water that clings to a vertical shard of glass, I can’t make out the noises around me, I start again, I should have stayed at home, I should have stayed at home,
refrains are so tedious
The opening of the novel is disorienting and disonnant, but the machine translation gets many things excruciatingly wrong. Even if putting the text through a machine tool might save me some of the time it takes to type a first draft, I suspect I would then spend much longer correcting the egregious mistakes.
There are no definitive translations. Nor can I claim that my own version offers the only (or even the best) solution to the many challenges posed by the text. It is, however – in my mind at least – a more satisfactory interpretation of Dulce’s extraordinary opening lines.
*
Because it is a stream-of-consciousness novel, Violeta Among the Stars is particularly well-suited to oral renditions. The website Translators Aloud, which publishes videos of translators reading their own work, will tomorrow release this clip of me reading the novel’s opening pages. The website founders have allowed me to give you, faithful newsletter reader, an exclusive sneak peek before the video is officially launched. You can watch it at the link below before it goes public. I hope you enjoy it.
