Cyborg Translators
(notes)
Languages are a problem. Intercultural communication is a problem. There are lots of people who speak lots of different languages. As long as people stay in one place for a long time, they tend to learn the language(s) of the people they're living with--though even then there are problems, explored by intercultural communication studies. If there is little or no migration, in or out, the problem seems to disappear--though only within the confines of the fairly stable language community. This situation has been idealized and normatized in nationalist Europe: one language per nation, or at worst one language per region; everybody studies foreign languages at school, enough to travel to the nearest foreign culture and get along, or to help foreigners from that culture get along where you live.
The more migration, the worse this problem becomes. Then we start imagining shortcuts. Paul's vision of spirit-channeling is one: not only can people pray for the charism of interpreting foreign languages; they can even produce the foreign languages themselves, create a kind of mini-Babel under more or less controlled (though not by them!) conditions.
Another is machine translation. Indeed in important ways MT is a scientific dream of spirit-channeling. Just as the Holy Spirit (or other spirit-guides) transforms the human speaker instantaneously into the perfect interpreter, so too does the dream translating machine. Invent a machine that will transform anyone into a translator or interpreter. The machine as Holy Spirit? The Holy Ghost in the machine.
Let's look at some of the forms of MT as imagined by science fiction writers over the past few decades, relying on the tabulation offered by Walter Meyers in Aliens and Linguists. Meyers traces linguistic and other related scientific thought as it is worked out in the pages of science fiction novels and stories up through the late seventies, when he wrote; his main concern, though it's sort of a subtext in an ostensibly "neutral" scholarly book, is to debunk the so-called science of science fiction where it touches his specialty, linguistics. But I want to use his chapter on MT--and, in a minute, the preceding chapter on language learning--as a kind of sourcebook.
Meyers distinguishes between "known-to-known" and "unknown-to-known" MT--the former is common in sf, the latter (which he calls a "magic decoder") less common
Gordon R. Dickson, "Jackal's Mean" (1969): "'Good to see you again, gentlemen,' said the Jhan, through the mechanical interpreter at his throat"; Poul Anderson, "A Little Knowledge" (1971): "The vocalizer on his breast rendered the sounds he made into soprano cadenzas and arpeggios, the speech of Lenidel" (119)
James Tiptree, Jr., "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty" (1971): "a character lands on a planet and sees a battle going on. 'Without pausing to think, he switched on his Omniglot Mark Eight voder and shouted 'Stop that!' (p. 46). And they do. ... Tiptree's model has a switch marked 'Semantic Digest'; when set to this position, the decoder will boil down the input speech and give you just a summary of what is being said, rather than a sentence-for-sentence translation, although it can do that too" (120)--this story is humor
Horace Fyfe, "Random" (1952): "the human explorers both gather and analyze data in a few hours; as they tell the master of the properly impressed slave who has reported their landing, 'We analyzed the speech of your companion this morning. ... The machine translates as we speak into it' (p. 211)" (120)
Jack Vance, The Eyes of the Overworld (1966): the hero Cugel is given a device by a magician: "In order to facilitate your speech, I endow you with this instrument which relates all possible vocables to every conceivable system of meaning" (a burlesque of the idea)
Michael Moorcock, An Alien Heat (1972):
"Greetings, people of this planet," began Yusharisp. "I come from the civilization of Pweeli"--here the translator he was using screeched for a few seconds and Yusharisp had to cough to readjust it--"many galaxies distant ..." Again a pause and a cough while Yusharisp adjusted his translator, which seemed to be a mechanical rather than an organic device of some kind, probably implanted in his equivalent of a throat by crude surgery--"I see you put the news more tactfully, but I, skree, skree, have so little time. There is nothing we can do, of course, to avert our fate. We can only prepare ourselves, philosophically, skree, skree, for (roar) death." (122)
Alan Dean Foster, The False Mirror (NY: Del Ray/Ballantine, 1993):
1. MT adjustments
(a) "'How know should I?' A disconsolate Fifth-of-Medicine adjusted his translator as he gestured in a vaguely southward direction with a long, delicate, claw-tipped finger" (47). Adjusted his translator to do what? Rearrange his syntax? In this book all Hivistahm use inverted syntax, whether they are speaking to each other in their own language or to other species via translator.
(b) "He'd adjusted his translator to handle the creature's own language, having determined that throwing words could be as provocative as throwing stones" (57). Does this imply that there are settings on the translator that allow the user to specify the target language? Elsewhere it is called a "universal translator" (89)--why then these adjustments?
(c) "Teoth fiddled with his translator, wanting to make certain everything he said was clearly comprehensible to his Hivistahm companions" (78). This seems to be operating on the analogy of a radio tuner: you fiddle with the dial to make a station come in more clearly. But even on a radio, is it possible to "fiddle" with the transmitter to make reception better? How does the sender know when the receiver is comprehending his or her transmission clearly? Even if it were possible to know such a thing, how could it be remote-controlled? And what would "fiddling" do to a machine translator? In our current state of MT incompetence, we would dearly like to know how to fine-tune a system so as to optimize target-language (re)production and so maximize receptor comprehension. But so far all our attempts remain woefully inadequate. What must this sf technology be like that a user, untrained in computational linguistics, can improve the results of translation by "fiddling" with the instrument?
(d) "He paid close attention as the finely tuned translator they had given him interpreted their conversation" (81). How does he know it's finely tuned? Or is this the narrator's omniscience at work?
2. The socioeconomics of MT
(a) "Since everyone had been equipped with translators, he found himself wondering at the presence of the Wais. Not that their contribution to the Weave was restricted to translating. They could do other things almost as well" (90). Does the existence of a species that has specialized in translating imply that MT technology is not universally available? Perhaps it is too expensive for some people, some groups, some planets to purchase, and they must rely on Wais?
(b) "The S'van hastened to intervene, disdaining the use of his translator in favor of fluent Hivistahm. He could speak Massood as well" (147). Socially, that "disdaining" implies, proficiency in foreign languages is valued more highly than translation.
3 The scope of translatability
(a) "The translator managed to convey the other Human's gruffness along with his words" (121). Does the translator imitate voices?
(b) "It [an enemy, a member of an alien species, the novel's main character] emitted an untranslatable grunt" (66). Does this imply that all grunts are untranslatable, or merely that this particular one was? Can the translators distinguish between language and nonlinguistic noise? Or is nonlinguistic noise simply anything that it cannot translate?
(c) "Fifth-of-Medicine's claws clicked together sideways, a gesture his kind used to express sarcasm" (71). Do the translators do body language? Or would this fall into the same category as "untranslatable grunts"?
104 learning foreign languages is slow and dull and tedious, it would drag the action down too much in an sf novel, so sf writers invent wishful devices like Clifford D. Simak's "transmog," "a snap-in section of a robot brain that contains all the information needed for a particular competence", including foreign languages. "The human himself, however, has to learn the native language the usual way, and finds it a hard job: 'For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain' (p. 215)" (104)
105 Beverly Friend lists five solutions to the problem of foreign languages in sf: the first is telepathy or MT; the other four are variations on the theme of the foreigners all speaking English, a postcolonial attitude that some spell out clearly, like Stephen Tall's explorer in The Ramsgate Paradox (1976): "With primitives I try to teach them our language rather than learn theirs, mainly because I can take the initiative. My objective is communication, not language study. We leave that to the etymologists. Further, good old English is much more versatile than any speech they are likely to have" (Meyers 105).
106 two solutions: make the traveler a fast language-learner, and make the foreign language simple
109 the trendy language-learning methods reflected in sf over a 25-year period: hypnosis, neural changes, sleep-learning, electric shock, chemical means, DNA/RNA
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1877): "while I had been placed in the state of trance ... I had been made acquainted with the rudiments of their language" (Meyers 109)
Poul Anderson in "Inside Earth": "several of the Earth's languages were hypnotically implanted in my brain" (110); PA, "A World Called Maanerek": "Kidnap a native, use accelerine and hypnosis to get the language and basic cultural information" (110); Larry M. Harris, "Lost in Translation," drug hypnosis
neural changes, based on the idea that memory is stored in a specific place in the brain and can be transplanted: Tak Hallus, "The Linguist," has an operation called an engramectomy: "The central figure of the story, Eberly, is an engram donor, a quick learner of foreign languages, who has seven times learned Spanish, only to have his engrams removed for sale. The operation costs $5,000, which explains why 'Liberal Arts seldom become economically interesting enough to transplant, except foreign languages, Eberly's specialty' (p. 91)" (111)
EEGs led to the idea that electrical brain waves could be transmitted: a character in Edmund Hamilton's "The King of Shadows" (1947) receives "a direct transmission of thought-currents" (111)
Poul Anderson, "Starfog" (1967): a character has a foreign language reencoded "into his own neurones" (112); PA's The Dancer from Atlantis (1971): "here the helmets, provided by a time-traveler from the future, are 'twin two-foot hemispheres of bright metal upon which were several tiny studs, plates, and switches' (p. 26). The traveler tells an American of our era that the machine scans the speech center in the brain, takes the language information, and passes it to the receiver's brain (p. 30). It's harmless, but stressful, 'seeing as hole ... the data patterns aren't just scanned, they're imposed' (p. 30)" (112)
sleep-learning: hero in Charles W. Runyon's "Sweet Helen" "threaded a tape into the reader, swallowed a narco-hyp capsule, and lay down on the bunk. He awoke a half hour later with a 2,000-word Eutrian vocabulary etched in his mind" (112)
vaccination against monolingualism: Poul Anderson gives a character in "Eutopia" (1967) an "electrochemical inculcation" of specific foreign languages for a trip (112-13); Alan Burt Akers, Transit to Scorpio (1972), "When the pill has dissolved and its genetic constituents habilitate themselves in your brain, you will have a complete understanding, both written and oral, of the chief language of Kregen" (113)
"Perhaps the best way is to always have an interpreter handy. Roger Zelazny supplies his hero in Doorways in the Sand (1976) with a semi-sentient information processing device that enters his body and thereafter translates for him. This being possesses all the benefits of a transmog, and provides conversation besides" (117)
"Writers of science fiction seldom spare their characters: they may slam their heroes' ships into planets or send their heroines to kill tigers with knives; they may freezd them into statues on Pluto or shoot them through exploding suns. Hardly any degradation or suffering is spared--with the exception of exposing them to the rigors of learning a foreign language. Off hand, one might think that mastering a planet is a task beside which memorizing a paradigm becomes insignificant, yet writers freely exercise their ingenuity in creating means of achieving instant fluency" (117)
