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‘The issues translation criticism has engaged—the whole body of work on the subject in philosophical, historical, and cultural analysis—are still relevant and necessarily present in this new technological moment. For example, machine translation assumes a fixed position for target and host languages, but as Venuti has argued, the complexity of translation practice in a global context requires our recognizing that “domestic” and “foreign” are shifting, variable, and mutually constitutive categories. Machine translation research also tends to suppose that linguistic knowledge (grammatical rules, idioms)—as opposed to the extra-linguistic—is the basis for all translations, which places it at odds with Spivak’s articulation of the critical and ethical pitfalls of privileging grammar over rhetoric. Without listening to the rhetoricity of the language of the Other, which involves an erotics of submission, she argues, one simply imposes a grammatical structure onto the text and effaces its voice and singularity. Following Spivak’s critique of the ethnocentricity and “law of the strongest” that compels the translation of non-European texts into a “with-it translatese,” Venuti has also called for a translation ethics of difference, a respect for “the foreignness of the foreign text,” rather than an “ethics of sameness that hews to dominant domestic values,” domesticating the foreign within state, or standard, language.’
“When engaged in the task of translation, can [the translator] perform a speech act such as making a promise? Is the translator responsible for what they say while translating? Due to the translator’s unavoidably ambiguous position, the answer too is ambiguous. Yes, they can make a promise, but only on behalf of someone else. They ‘themselves’ cannot make a promise. The translator is responsible for the translation but they cannot be held responsible for the pledges expressed in it, because they are not allowed to say what they mean; they are required to say what they say without meaning it. In essence, the translator is someone who cannot say ‘I’.”
The relationship between human writer (speaker) and the mechanical agent (transcriber) has been shaken loose to the point where the simple subject-object or user-tool dichotomy is strained. As an outcome of a four-way input-output-input loop, the computer has in effect become the fourth writer, which the three other writers are responding to by either going along with or resisting its influence or intervention, its “input.” The process is exploiting the gap that is likely to remain in natural language processing no matter how sophisticated the statistical approaches – with complex algorithms and massive linguistic databases – are to become.
“Damit ist allerdings zugestanden, daß alle Übersetzung nur eine irgendwie vorläufige Art ist, sich mit der Fremdheit der Sprachen auseinanderzusetzen.”
Walter Benjamin: Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers
“As the computer enlarges its range of action, human expression has been increasingly shaped by collaborative systems of authorship. These systems can be defined as computer systems that attain autonomy or semi-autonomy in the structuring of complex signs. Computer systems are able to organize information into highly complex clusters and may eventually surpass the human ability to generate original artworks. The prospect of artificially programmed ‘authors’ challenges artists’ identities as they have been traditionally defined. In the process, a series of questions emerge. How are artists and writers reacting to forms of artificial intelligence, media technology, and software, that can be seen as new ‘authors’? How do theoreticians, historians and critics evaluate the authoring of meaning created by computer programs? Is the human mind now being challenged to supersede the creative abilities of technomedia and electronic systems? What becomes of artists when artificial processes are prioritized over the human production of meaning?”
Artur Matuck: Technologies for Interauthorship
Man könnte sagen, dass Freud’sche Versprecher – unbeabsichtigte Fehlleistungen beim Sprechen, von denen man glaubt, dass sie Ausdruck des Unbewussten des Sprechenden sind und geheime Konflikte oder Wünsche offenlegen und die im Drama oft eine bedeutende Rolle spielen – hier durch mechanische Fehler und Pannen ersetzt worden sind.
“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”
Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator (trans. Harry Zohn)
Translational violence
“Translational symmetry cannot be obtained at the surface level precisely because such symmetry cannot be found at the level of Tagore’s ‘associations’, Benjamin’s ‘connotations’ and Frege’s ‘colourings and shadings’, or what can be called the cultural depths of language. Postmodern approaches to the question of translation valorize this limit, whereas modernity we can recognize, thanks to postmodern interventions, effaces the limit. The effacement of the limit, through the mediation of a metalanguage, in postcolonial terms, is constitutive of translational violence.”
“[-] There is no correct text, no final text, no original text, but only texts that are different, drifting in their like differences.” (Joseph Grigely, Textualterity, 119)
“Is it possible to isolate and juxtapose [languages] as individual units, like apples, for example, and unlike water?”
Jos sydämentahdistinta käyttävä ihminen on kyborgi – biologinen organismi johon on yhdistetty teknologiaa – miten olisi ymmärrettävä osin koneen kirjoittama näytelmä?
Otso Huopaniemi: Mekaaninen sihteeri taluttaa satunnaista puhujaa
Trujillo’s intelligibility scale
Trujillo, A. 1999. Translation Engines: Techniques for Machine Translation. London: Springer-Verlag.
Was ist aber die Aufgabe des Maschinellen Übersetzers?
“Jene reine Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen, die im Werk gefangene in der Umdichtung zu befreien, ist die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.”
Walter Benjamin: Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers
Jeder Fehler ist potenziell eine kreative Veruntreuung, die, gerade durch ihre Falschheit, den mehrfach übersetzten Text weiterschreibt und in unerwartete Richtungen lenkt.
The basic idea was to feed back into the system whatever it had “coughed up” and have it translate it again, numerous times. Using copy-paste, I simply moved a section of text back into the translation box, inverted the source and target languages, and with a click of the icon had GT translate its English translation of a scene back into Finnish—and then back into English again. The result was a cyclical string of variations in which GT kept making changes to each version, debating certain phrases up until at least the fourth or fifth variation. After that the translation began to “settle down”, stabilize, with changes becoming increasingly marginal or, in some cases, non-existent.
from A tree does not make a well-formed sentence (Sennrich, R.; Williams, P.; Huck, M.)
“Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
“We fail to communicate because we are in common with one another. Community does not mean we share common ground. On the contrary, we are in community precisely because we are exposed to a forum where our differences and failure in communication can be manifest.”
Ootko kuollu?
Experimenting with speech recognition in Finnish for the first time.
Writers: Katri Kauppala and Rosa-Maria Perä.
June, 2015
“Despite countless potential differences within one linguistic community, the regime of translation obliges one to speak from within a binary opposition, either to the same or to the other. Thus, in the regime of translation the translator becomes invisible because the translator is the one who eludes an identification within the binary (Venuti, 1995: 1–46).”
“It seems that at the present state of machine translation, one does indeed have to choose between getting either the form or the meaning right. In the present form, however, we can already find good translations, as a sort of found poetry (Drury, 2006), by translating a large quantity of text, whether poetic or not.”
Genzel-Uszkoreit-Och: “‘Poetic’ Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter”
“The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
wir sind ein Lehmaan
Josep Caballero García, Lee Meir, Ania Nowak
13 November 2015
Theaterdiscounter, Berlin
“On mahdotonta asettua asemaan, josta käsin voisi aidosti odottaa vastausta kysymykseen kuka puhuu ja mistä positiosta käsin. Esityksen teatterillisuus ei rakennu juonen, henkilöiden tai edes tapahtumapaikan yhtenäisyyden vaan heterogeenisten elementtien epävakaan yhteispelin varaan.”
Ich fing an, die Form des hauptsächlich autobiografischen, realistischen Stückeschreibens, die ich zehn Jahre lang praktiziert und systematisiert hatte, als eine Form der Selbstausbeutung, oder „selfploitation“, zu betrachten, die trotz theoretisch interessanter Aspekte letztendlich ermüdend und selbsterschöpfend war. Es gab nur eine begrenzte Anzahl an bittersüßen persönlichen Erfahrungen, durch die ich die conditio humana darstellen konnte, ehe das Verfassen solcher Stücke zum sich selbst reproduzierenden System wurde, das nur neuerlich – im Unterschied zu neuen – Dramen erzeugte, und zwar durch ein emotionales Recycling, das sich (zurecht) anfühlte wie ein Wiederkäuen.
Kaksi tasoa risteää: kohtauksen hetkellinen fiktio ja kohtauksen kirjoittamisen prosessi, jota yleisö seuraa reaaliajassa. Käänne syöksee kirjoittajan tai kirjoittajat välitilaan, joka vaatii välitöntä vastausta, reaktiota. Kirjoittajan on pakko hahmottaa uusiksi kohtauksen (tai repliikin) kulkua ja kaarta, pakko suuntautua uudelleen. Viime kädessä hänelle jää kaksi vaihtoehtoa: taipua tietokoneen erheen sanelemaan käänteeseen tai vastustaa sitä.
Otso Huopaniemi: Mekaaninen sihteeri taluttaa satunnaista puhujaa
“[-] the translator cannot be designated straightforwardly either as I or you: they disrupt the attempt to appropriate the relation of the addresser and addressee as a personal relation between the first person and the second person. The translator cannot be the first or second person, or even the third ‘person’ undisruptively. Ineluctably, translation introduces an instability into the putatively personal relations among the agents of speech, writing, listening and reading. The translator is internally split and multiple, devoid of a stable position. At best, they are subject in transit.”
“Translation suggests contact with the incomprehensible, the unknowable, or the unfamiliar, that is, with the foreign, and there is no awareness of language or meaning until we come across the foreign. First and foremost, the problematic of translation is concerned with the allocation of the foreign.”
“It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.”
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
Warren Weaver: Tower of Anti-Babel
“Note that code, along with the ‘easy and useful communication’ it enables, happens in the basement (at the foundational level), and not, as in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator”, at the transcendent level, where translatability is guaranteed by the ultimate power of God. For Weaver, code resides in the basement because it functions as the man-made linguistic practice capable of undoing God’s disruptive fracturing, at the Tower of Babel, of an ur-language into many languages. In Weaver’s analogy, men get back their own not by building the tower higher but by discovering the common basement in which they can communicate freely with one another.”
N. Katherine Hayles: How We Think – Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
“In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive; a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced [expérimenter].”
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
Mind Machine
Photo: Pilvari Pirtola
“What is most problematic about the conventional conception of translation is that, due to its inherent metaphysics of communication (Nancy, 1991), it presents translation as a process of homogenization and of establishing equivalence. But translation always inscribes itself in the social topos of incommensurability and difference, and what I specifically call cultural difference, to which translation is a response, is anterior to and fundamentally heterogeneous to the conceptual difference of species, the difference between particularities. Translation articulates one text to another, but it does not mean that translation merely establishes equivalence between two texts, two languages or two groups of people.”
Instances of accompaniment (Begleiterscheinungen/Momente der Begleitung) würde ich die Momente nennen, in denen der Computer etwas generiert – ein Wort oder eine Phrase, manchmal auch ein unerwartetes und unnötiges Sprachsignal -, das der menschliche Autor-Performer dann in den Text-in-Progress integriert.
“Writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning.”
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author (transl. Richard Howard)
“Kirjoitus muodostaa lakkaamatta merkitystä, mutta vain haihduttaakseen sitä: kirjoitus vapauttaa merkitystä systemaattisesti.”
Roland Barthes: Tekijän kuolema (suom. Lea Rojola)
Koneen mieli
Kuva: Pilvari Pirtola
“The translator is summoned only when two kinds of audiences are postulated with regard to the source text, one for whom the text is comprehensible at least to some degree, and the other for whom it is incomprehensible. The translator’s work consists in dealing with difference between the two audiences. The translator encroaches on both and stands in the midst of this difference.”