John Jamieson’s Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation has a good deal to say about Walter Benjamin’s ideas about language and understanding a text, as well as “the seemingly inexorable drift we are seeing towards a disembodied language — the language of machine translation output and AI.” He begins with “an article in a Finnish philosophy magazine about a new collection of Walter Benjamin essays translated into Finnish” and says:
The essential idea I gleaned from the article was the contemporary — that is to say, occurring about 100 years ago — decline in the art of storytelling. Particularly in “The Storyteller” (Der Erzähler), his essay devoted to the Russian author Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin describes and laments a transition from the epic genre, storytelling and the “exchange of experience” — firstly to printed texts and the novel, and then ultimately to mere “information”.
This transition from relationships to information provides a very useful and suggestive framework for describing linguistic communication on all sorts of different scales, and on many different levels, from the most general — the evolution of language as such — to the most specific — ie what happens every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone is saying to us.
It seems to me that the starting point on Benjamin’s transition — the genuine exchange of experience — is basically where speech comes from, where it originates.
But what I want to highlight, as usual, is the part where he gets specific:
At this point I want to transit to the very personal story of my efforts to understand the final paragraph of the Finnish article I was reading that day on a Wellington suburban train.
This is the original text:
Seminaaripäivän kenties mieleenpainuvin puheenvuoro onkin tarina Pariisin ruumishuoneista. Ensin en tajua, mistä on kyse — eihän aihe liity Benjaminiin lainkaan. Mädäntyvien kalmojen haju ja kuoleman ihmittely täytävät kuitenkin pian hapettoman huoneen, ja unohdan, että kaikesta kuullusta tulisi olla jotain hyötyä. Tämän tarinan myös kerroin eteenpäin heti kotiin päästyäni. Lopuksi tarinankertoja kieltää itse lukeneensa Benjaminia, ja kutsuu meitä niin tehneitä hörhöiksi.
And this is my translation:
Perhaps the most memorable presentation during the day’s proceedings was a description of the morgues of Paris. My first reaction was, what on earth did this have to do with Benjamin? But the odour of rotting corpses and the dread fascination of death soon filled the stuffy seminar room, and I forgot the rule that all the day’s presentations should have some relevance or value for the participants. And I have to admit that this was the first paper I talked about later on returning home. In any event, the presenter concluded by telling us he had never read a word of Benjamin’s writings, and more fools we if we had.
Initially I found this paragraph very hard to understand. There I was, sitting in the train, letting my thoughts drift somewhat aimlessly over these sentences. Then, just as I arrived at my destination, I “got it”.
What did I get, and how did I get it? I realised that my obtuseness had been because of my failure to intuit the experiential exchange, the interactional how, that underpinned the text — which changed from one sentence to the next, as we shall see.
He proceeds to a detailed account of how the Finnish passage works (from that, and from assiduous use of Wiktionary, I learned a fair amount about the language) and why he translated it the way he did (“The change from historic present to simple past has been made because in English, to my ear, the use of the present tense in the MT version gives the text a vivid, suspenseful feel that is out of keeping with a description of past events presented as essentially true and accurate”); if you like that sort of thing, click on through to the other site.
The change from historic present to simple past has been made because in English, to my ear, the use of the present tense in the MT version gives the text a vivid, suspenseful feel that is out of keeping with a description of past events presented as essentially true and accurate
I’ve often noticed this in the English translations of the informational signs in museums in France (and, just lately, in Bruges.) They tend to be something that no L1 speaker would ever produce, and a wholly unidiomatic use of the historical present is very common. (Outright lexical mistakes are not rare, either: I suspect they really do use GT.)
«Брюгге и его прелести»
The thing is, the word прелесть in plural is only used to refer to attractive (for men) parts of a woman’s body.
Some recent citations from the Национальный корпус русского языка:
Норрат же переживает все прелести неравновесной экономики.
А мы-то, когда гости спрашивали, почему не летим самолетом, расписывали прелести нашего знаменитого поезда!
Кто-то, безусловно, оценит прелести экологии: красивая природа, Волга.
Вот туда-то Михаил Мень и решил перенести фестиваль «Зеркало», рассчитывая, что прелести русской провинции помогут привлечь гостей и создать неповторимую атмосферу.
Словом, я был по уши погружен во все прелести творческой жизни, не замечая, что превращаю себя в живой труп.
Внутренняя междоусобица, забастовки, баррикады и прочие прелести, и несомненный результат всего этого — принятие самых позорных условий мира, сдача России торжествующему врагу.
“What greater challenge could there be than to translate non-human into human, to breathe fresh vitality into a desiccated husk of information?”
What greater challenge could there be than to spend my days moving robot words around and trying not to let the priming effect and the fact that I’m probably earning half as much on a tighter deadline lead to the production of stale crap, quite possibly with errors I would never have made on my own? Why on Earth do we need this intermediate thing, except to give publishers an excuse to pay even less? A first draft is not something anyone or anything else can produce for me, it’s my first reading – which means my first deeper understanding – of the text. You can’t cut corners on reading. (I could be pissier about some things in the article, but will restrain myself lest I regret it.)
The purpose of LLMs is to destroy information.
If he does things for the challenge, I can’t help him.
Engish “storytelling” and “storyteller” are very useful words that Russian doesn’t even have:(
I remember how I once fantacised about Earth where computers find Ideal [sexual, romantic, marriage] partners for everyone. The fantasy was about a group of people who moved to another planet. They don’t listen to computers and moreover, they want their marital (and some other maybe) decisions to be irrational.
Strange that Google STILL doesn’t tell people who to date and who to marry.
Most of the necessary data can’t be published.
…in the EU at least.
@drasvi: See Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for something similar in a limited way. (Unfortunately, the promised sequel never happened.)
I don’t remember if Chip’s completely written it off, but IIRC it’s definitely not happening. But read Stars, it a great novel. And we already had that, in a personally controlled way, for a decade and a half IRL anyway. It’s enshittified now, but it worked for a while.
I always feel like I should like Delany, but I don’t. I hadn’t been enjoying Babel-17, but I was expecting it to get better. However, the marbles scene was so bad that I just gave up.
I’d say try “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, which a lot of people like a lot. If you don’t enjoy that one, give up.