translation

Why Machine Translation is Not My Bogeyman

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File:Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 13 (Canto V - Minos).jpg
Gustave Doré – Dante Alighieri – Inferno – Plate 13 (Canto V – Minos)

There are many misconceptions about the job of translators. When I get out from behind my computer and into the world, the people I interact with, from family members to other professionals to parents in my son’s 0-3 play group, inevitably do one of the following: treat me as a human dictionary, express skepticism about my stance on not translating out of my mother tongue, act surprised I don’t speak a gazillion languages, give me a sly look as they ask about machine translation and what they assume is my impending obsolescence. An author once jokingly admitted his astonishment at meeting a real live translator, as if I were a rare specimen, one bound for extinction. (I went on to translate several of his books.) Even though much of what we do as translators happens remotely, and so necessarily through the mediation of machines, our task remains inherently human. I have no interest in reading a novel or poem written by a robot, since how can a machine give me insight into the human soul? Likewise for a translation made entirely through machine translation: how can technology understand and render all the nuance, tone, cultural innuendo, and je ne sais quoi of great literature? Indeed, the fact that some books get retranslated again and again, to better speak to different generations of readers, is telling.

Yet machine translation, particularly together with other features of Computer Assisted Translation tools, is becoming more and more vital to our work, making us more efficient, less prone to error, and better able to collaborate—provided, that is, we know when and how to make use of these tools. For some texts, they can be an asset. Translation software is often a good solution for documents featuring a lot of repetition, since it helps translators be consistent in their vocabulary choices and can free up mental space for more challenging areas of the text. It can also ensure that numbers and dates don’t get distorted through typing errors. Moreover, in my work as a translation proofreader, I have come across many translations with missing sections of the original text. This can happen when translations are made under tight deadlines that don’t give translators the time to review their own work against the source text. But, even under time constraints, it can be avoided with the help of translation software. Finally, for large, on-going projects (as in some legal cases, long-term marketing campaigns, etc.) software can help translators work together and provide consistent language choices, even over periods of many years.

In my experience, machine translation tools are not well suited to literary or even academic translation. In addition to the loftier ideals mentioned above, I attribute this in large part to parsing. Most translation software parses texts into sentence-by-sentence segments and will then provide translation suggestions, recommended vocabulary, and so forth. But a literary translator needs to work not only at the minute level of the sentence or the individual word, they also have to grasp the larger whole, which can sometimes call for work on a more architectural scale as the translator rebuilds a section to better reflect what the source text is up to. Even the suggestions given by machine translation can be a nuisance, cluttering the translator’s mind and preventing them from straying away from the source text’s syntax, for example, to find other, less obvious solutions.

Similar reservations can be expressed for academic translation, though there is one thing I would like to add: academic style. Cultural differences apply not only to the content of what is being expressed but to the form. The ways in which we express ideas, including sentence length, the amount and type of jargon used, what we consider “smart” language, the acceptable use of repetition or passive voice, and so many other factors, can vary dramatically from one academic culture to the next. And this cultural straddling, this refashioning of a text to make it cohere with the target culture’s expectations and norms: this requires human judgment.

I am a translator, and I am not afraid machine translation will put me out of a job. Machine translation is one of many tools at my disposal to provide the best possible translations for my clients. Now, what is my bogeyman? A last-minute babysitter cancellation when I’ve got a deadline coming up. Or the Internet going down …

The American Translators Association has a useful position paper on machine translation: ATA Position Paper on Machine Translation: A Clear Approach to a Complex Topic. Their takeaway: “Professional translators and machine translation engines work together very well. […] If reliable and secure translation is desired, machine translation should not be used without the ongoing involvement of professional translators.”

Writing Exile

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This month’s issue of Words without Borders, a monthly magazine publishing literature from around the world, focuses on the theme of exile.

Living abroad, working and thinking between languages and cultures, I am keenly interested in the ways in which encounters with the foreign shape our identities, transforming us into hybrid beings — caught somewhere between our roots and otherness. This experience, the startling disjunction between self and self-other, is perhaps most radical in cases of exile. Indeed, in the piece I’ve translated for this issue, Chadian author Koulsy Lamko compares exile to a nearly impossible act of grafting:

“Splicing oneself onto a strange root successfully is a miracle. Unless one possesses the properties of mistletoe and can grow on a tree whose roots are not one’s own. Slowly but surely, exile erases us from the memory of our land. And the day we try to go back to our country, to set foot there, by chance, for a sun, a moon, we realize that our land has abandoned us; it has turned its back on us, doesn’t recognize us anymore, has disowned us.”*

Reading the pieces in Writing Exile, I am reminded of a line in Maurice Blanchot asserting that a work worth translating is one that reflects a living language’s otherness with respect to itself (“Traduire”, L’Amitié). Here, it seems that subject and form are well matched, for in a magazine in which translation plays a central role, with writings by Venezuelan, Syrian, Iraqi, Chadian writers in exile, we are given a multiplicity of accounts and voices struggling with the shifting borders between self and other.

Click on the image to access the issue:

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*Citation from a translated excerpt of Les racines du Yucca, a story about an African author with a paper allergy who ends up organizing writing workshops in the Yucatán for exiles and survivors of war.

On Bookstore Shelves Now: African Lives

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African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies is now available online and in bookstores. This collection features pieces written by authors from across the African continent and spanning several centuries. As editor Geoff Wisner says in his introduction, the book can be read straight through or by skipping around:

“The selections are arranged to follow the map of Africa as
you would read a page in a book: top to bottom and left to right, beginning
with North Africa and continuing through West Africa, Central
Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa. Within each region, the selections
are in alphabetical order by country. Within each country, they are
arranged chronologically, according to the date of the events described.

Layout 1

By a happy accident, African Lives begins in childhood, with Mohammed
Dib’s memories of growing up in Algeria. It ends in maturity and exile, on
a note of leave-taking, as Chenjerai Hove writes to his mother in Zimbabwe
from his new home in Norway. Between these two voices, I hope you will
find many more to challenge, inspire, and enlighten you.”

This is such a wonderful book, and together with my co-translator, Antoine Bargel, I am delighted to make three newly translated pieces available to the anglophone world: Yasmina Khadra’s The Writer (excerpt); Christian Dumoux’ Childhood in Madagascar (excerpt); Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Fraternal Bond (excerpt).

Sub-Saharan African Literature

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Yale French Studies published an issue last fall (2011) on “Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts“, in which appear articles by scholars and writers from diverse backgrounds on various mutations and transformations in Francophone sub-Saharan literature, particularly with respect to globalization.  Among others, see the piece I translated by Cilas Kemedjio titled “The Suspect Nation:  Globalization and the Postcolonial Imaginary”, in which the author “addresses the tenuous links between nation-building and diasporic formations, nationalism and transnationalism, and therefore globalization itself” (Editors’ Preface, 7).

Collaboration for Words without Borders

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I’ve recently had the pleasure of collaborating with French writer and translator Antoine Bargel on a selection of poetry and prose for the May 2012 edition of Words without Borders on “Writing from the Indian Ocean”.  Our contributions include works by the writers Michel Ducasse, Alain Gordon-Gentil, Boris Gamaleya, and Jean-Luc Raharimanana, all of whom, as scholar Françoise Lionnet describes, “imaginatively [engage] with the public and private realms of life in […] historical and strategic insular sites of migration that have brought together the peoples of many continents, near and far” (“Insularity, Mobility, and Imagination:  Writing from the Indian Ocean”).  In these pieces, the raw iteration of the abject, the probing struggle with memory, and the stark critique of global injustice, made for a challenging task of translation and a stimulating read.  I hope you enjoy this issue of Words without Borders as much as I have:  http://wordswithoutborders.org/issue/may-2012