I had one of those moments when I suddenly realized, in one small area, at least, how incredibly parochial I can be. It came while watching this clip of Eric Clapton playing Big Bill Broonzy's Key to the Highway:
Did you notice the Japanese subtitles? I realized that although the words could explain approximately what he was singing, they could never get close to the style. Little slurs, bends in the language itself, regional deliveries, accents - there's no way you can get any of that from letters scrolled at the bottom of the screen. And then I realized how little I get from performances by foreign musicians. Beyond the words, you get into delivery, idiom, and a host of other things that fall into a context when you're from that culture. For example, I'll have different associations for delta blues and Chicago electric. I know how something about how they're related and how they differ. But unless you've learned about this one way or the other, the resonance of experience, like overtones from your own life, simply don't exist.
According to the Google explanations on the frontpage and their product overview page, we can see this is meant to be a translation service which offers both volunteers and professional translators... and I suppose at least the professionals will want to get paid. In that regards, the service is in the field of sites like Click2Translate.com (a service by the company which Tony works for, incidentally, and which I’m often using for some of my sites).
But what is really interesting reading at the moment is a translator's view on what Google will do and how it will profit. According to Brian McConnell, a problem for machine translation is its need for pairs of directly (and, presumably, well) translated sentences. The systems then build a statistical analysis to let them swap out phrases to pull together a translation.
Unfortunately, the sources of material are usually governmental bureaucratic meanderings, hence the questionable quality of the results. What Google offers is the possibility of a centralized repository to build an incredibly useful database of translations, which might improve the quality of machine translation. If you've wondered about how writing moves from one language into another, this should be interesting.
Apparently, Dmitri Nabokov, the 73-year-old son and translator of writer Vladimir Nabokov, has a dilemma: whether to destroy his father's last literary work or make it available, in an unfinished form, to the world. I remember writing an article on literary executors. One of the discussions I had with an expert was the experience of Franz Kafka's executor. Kafka wanted all of his manuscripts destroyed, and yet the executor, a friend of his, decided instead to let them be published.
It would have been a pity if books like The Fall had never been available for reading. But there is a difference, I think, between completed books and a collection of index cards that might have the equivalent of 30 manuscript pages - not the same as a finished work. And yet, what do you do when you have control over such a hot literary property? I can understand why Dmitri Nabokov hesitates, though inclining to destryong them. But it's a pitty that he mentioned them in the first place, then. At his death, Kafka was not known broadly as a writer, so the decision was, perhaps, easier. But once Nobokov let the cat out of the bag, I can see how the pressure can mount. As I've yet to read a greater or lesser novel by the Russian, it's hard for me to summon forth the dudgeon necessary to literary angst. So much for ever becoming a Critic.
French Teen Arrested for Posting Potter Translation
French police arrested a 16-year old from Aix-en-Provence for posting his own translation of the final Harry Potter novel before the release of the official version, scheduled for October. According to the Reuters story, here's what a representative of Gallimard, publisher of the sanctioned French version of the novels, said:
"It is not a young person or a fan we are talking about here -- these are organized networks that use young people," she told Reuters by telephone.
Networks using young people? Oh, right, there are criminal networks recruiting young people to surrepticiously translate large novels from one langauge to another and then to post their work on the web, removing any chance of making money off their effort. The criminal networks, concerned that they seem to be making nothing from their enterprises, are said to be planning to retain consultants to help analyze their business models.
Randy Hecht, a bilingual colleague and friend, told me a funny story about an article she was doing. For this to make sense, you have to understand that sometimes she writes in English and sometimes in Spanish. She was actually trying to put something into Spanish about an experience she had in Mexico and needed to describe someone puckering his mouth, indicating that he wanted a kiss. But she didn't know the Spanish word for pucker. She checked one dictionary after another and couldn't find it. She checked with her extensive set of Latino friends and colleagues and finally, in a last bit of exasperation, checked with Edith Grossman, something that both of us have interviewed int he past and one of the leading Spanish to English translators in the world. (She's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's translator.) The upshot that there doesn't appear to be any Spanish word or phrase for puckering up. When Randy told me this, I started laughing, not only because it was funny on its own, but because I realized that there is also the English word purse, so we've got not just one, but two ways of visibly preparing for a kiss. Guess that in Latino parts of the world they just jump right in and don't waste time making funny faces and staring at each other.
There are many stories of companies that ended up looking foolish, or worse, when they tried crossing the gulf that language translation can be. Here's another case, where a British menswear store sold shirts with a Russian ethnic cleansing slogan - in Russian, of course, that no one bothered to have translated to be sure.
A blog about images and words, photography and plays, art and articles, and any other combination or alliteration that takes my fancy. I'm a writer, photographer, and guy trying to learn to draw and paint.
About Me
Name: Erik Sherman
Location: Massachusetts, United States
I'm an independent writer and photographer who covers business, food, technology, books, media, general features, and pretty much anything appealing that results in a signed check. My work has appeared in such places as the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Newsweek Japan, Fortune, Inc, Fortune Small Business, the Financial Times, Advertising Age, Saveur, US News & World Report, and Continental
