11/30 Comments

 

        Bellos' text on Google Translate was interesting for me to read simply because I've definitely used Google Translate in the past and have seen both the accuracies and inaccuracies of the program. Though in the past, I'd mostly used it for Mandarin - English translations (simply because that was the language I studied in middle school/high school), in the latter half of high school, I actually used it mostly for Japanese. The reason for this was because Google Translate has a sort of review feature where you can correct, review, and help with more accurately translating the language you've selected. As a means of brushing up on my Japanese, I'd spent some time doing so in my free time. It was an interesting experience where I found myself taken aback by sentence fragments, which of course lacked context, that made me cock my head and think huh. What does this mean? It was really my first conscious attempt at translating Japanese / English so I'm quite attached to Google Translate still even if some translations still make me chuckle. As Bellos states in their closing paragraph, I highly doubt Google Translate will ever become accurate enough to perform literary translations in an authentic sense (and it's unreasonable to expect it to do so) since it'll almost always be a copy from someone (plural) else, simply because of how the program is made. And of course, there is that component of no translation being correct. I do think it'd be astounding if machine translations evolved to a point where it can take into account things like historical context, but I do think that'd be quite difficult. 

        Steiner's "The Hermeneutic Motion" was quite a dense read and not as interesting for me. It seemed to reiterate much of what we have discussed in previous readings, and I agree with Steiner in that there are words/phrases that simply cannot be translated in a 1 to 1 sense. But still, there are ways to go around such issues (even if it can get wordy) so I don't think it's quite as dramatic an issue as Steiner seems to put it. I also agree that there is no perfect translation or the "perfect "double'" but I think that's part of the charm of translation. Just like how we can describe the sky in hundreds of different ways, the same sentence can be translated in hundreds of ways, each one with a different emphasis or uniqueness to it. Of course, some might be more literal or poetic than others, but they're still an attempt to convey the meaning of the original to a different audience.