From an essay written several centuries ago by Catherine des Roches (or Kate of the Rocks), who really wanted to be an intellectual rather than have to hang out at balls and parties in pursuit of “courtly love”: “quant à moy, qui n’ay jamais fait aveu d’aucun serviteur, et qui ne pense point meriter que les hommes se doivent asservir pour mon service…” Google proposes the following: “as to me, who has never made a confession of any servant, and who does not think it merits that men ought to enslave me for my service…” This is semantically and grammatically challenged, ie complete garbage. Or what about this? A touch more obscure and archaic, but not unintelligible. And, inevitably, of course, you still get it wrong. You – for a brief impossible moment – become Tolstoy, and then and only then can you re-express what was said somewhere else in some other time in your own words in your own time. The experience of having been born and being doomed to die also get in there. You infuse the words with your own memories, your experiences, your fears and desires, things you have done or seen or fantasised about or heard once in a song on the radio that you will never hear again. Something like ideas, imprecise though that term is. So you convert them into something other than words. But – and this is the point that Google tends to miss – those squiggles on the page actually represent something other than words, they are not reducible to mere information ones and zeroes. This is what happens in a serious translation. It’s not just that certain words (eg hygge in Danish) cannot be satisfactorily translated: none of them can. There is no direct equivalence of one language to another. There is, at the core of the translation process, a mystery, an almost mystic transcendence. (And it goes on, “Et sa maman lui dit, ce n’est pas gentil de manger du riz sur un tapis gris.”) You could argue about the tense and even the choice of noun (is “mat” really “tapis”?) But the main point is that Google can’t see that it’s a mnemonic, made up of rhyming monosyllables, and that the best solution is to change the species, which is what French does, in the children’s rhyme, “Il était une souris qui mangeait du riz sur un tapis gris…” (There once was a mouse who was eating rice on a grey carpet…) Now that I can remember. But try remembering that 50-odd years from now. One of the first sentences I (like many others, I suspect) can remember learning, probably around the age of 3 or 4, before even going to school, is this: “The cat sat on the mat.” Google Translate suggests: “Le chat s’est assis sur le tapis.” Again, good try Google. Perhaps it’s obvious that a machine is going to struggle with the resonance and complexity of, say, Victor Hugo or Jean-Paul Sartre.
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