By ROBERT McCRUM [The Observer] – Google is in the vanguard of what is becoming a revolution in the scope and technique of translation. Google’s solution to a quintessentially human problem…implements Wittgenstein: “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.” So it will search stupendous archives of translated material and uses probability to derive the likeliest meaning, based on context. To do this, Google Translate draws on a database of several trillion words, taken from a corpus of UN documentation, Harry Potter novels, press reports and inter-company memoranda.
Recently Google Translate added five tongues – Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali and Gujarati – to its iPhone app, and can now supply translations for some 63 languages. Bellos gives the most succinct explanation of its mechanics: “Translation is what you get, but translation isn’t really what Google does. It’s like the difference between engineering and knowledge. An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly.”
The dream of a true universal language is in the end dependent on perfect translation. Aside from the lessons of Babel, the history of the Bible istelf offers other cautionary tales, particularly this year – the 400th anniversary of that great cathedral of language, the King James Bible. The anniversary has proved to be both a cause for celebration and for reflection on whether there can ever be an ideal or final version of such a work. Isn’t every new rendering bound to reflect the social and cultural context in which its translator works ?
Here, the impact of a global audience equipped with “some kind of English” (but not much) becomes acute. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, noted in his sermon at the thanksgiving service for the KJB, “the temptation is always there for a modern translation to look for strategies that make the text more accessible”.
By contrast, he added, there is a role for complexity too. The notorious mysteries of the KJB have the power, as he put it, “to surprise us into seriousness”. He pointed to the modest ambitions of the 1611 translators, who declared that the job of translation was to let in the light and remove “the cover of the well, that we may come by the water”.
Continued at The Observer | More Chronicle & Notices.
