11/30 Reading Comments

  In “Fictions of the Foreign,” David Bellos talks about machine translation and its advantages and disadvantages. Machine translation first developed during the Cold War, as the United States did not have enough translators who knew Russian. Developers of machine translation regarded Russian as a code, stating that once the two-language lexicons were inside the machine, the machine would be able to translate from one code to another after giving it the whole set of rules by which people in the two languages generate meaningful combinations of terms. Bellos then talks about more modern forms of machine translation, such as Google Translate. Google Translate, like every other form of machine translation, is not 100% accurate, because first of all, there is no such thing as a “correct translation,” and second, it only “gives only an expression consisting of the most probable equivalent phrases as computed by it’s analysis of an astronomically large set of paired sentences trawled from the web.” He then states that behind every form of machine translation, a human translation always came first. Machine translation, although not always completely accurate, is helpful in urgent situations. For example, in the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Carnegie Mellon University released Haitian-Creole text and spoken data, which proved to be very helpful as it developed a machine translation system that worked to communicate with victims of the earthquake. Bellos ends his writing by arguing that although machine translation can be helpful due to its speed and easy access, it should never be used for original works. 

In terms of Steiner's reading, I was very confused by his argument and I was not quite sure what he was trying to say. However, I liked how he explained that while translating, the translator should refrain from simply replicating the original text, and they should add their own interpretation of the text. I think that this furthers the creativity of the translator, and it would be interesting comparing different translations.