Reading Dr John Jamieson’s essay “Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation” via the Overland Literary Journal. Jamison is a translator from Aotearoa New Zealand and a funding member of the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters.
In this thought-provoking essay, Jamieson discusses how storytelling as an “exchange of experience” is increasingly superseded by the provision of information. This problematic “transition from interaction to information” is further exacerbated by the use of AI-based machine translation programs, which can “instantly and effortlessly” reproduce the information contained in a text from one language to another.
Jamieson then argues that, in terms of post-editing and even training machine translation, translators can help remedy this problem by putting the “story” back into the “information”. His conclusion: “My quest is to get an unintelligible text to ‘talk’ and tell a story, to put the kōrero back into the executive summary… What greater challenge could there be than to translate non-human into human, to breathe fresh vitality into a desiccated husk of information?”
This essay reminds me of Ted Chiang’s excellent article “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” via The New Yorker. It also reminds me of the metafictional short story “A machine-shaped hand”, created by OpenAI’s new creative writing and viewable via The Guardian.
Image thanks to: “The 5 risks of machine translation” (https://www.textmaster.com/blog/dangers-machine-translation/)
(Day 45 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 