Machine Translation(s)

It might be argued that no technology is ever entirely new, that

apart from the fact of its essential overdetermination, every ‘new’
technology has always already in some way been anticipated, imagined
in the desiring apparatuses of our collective representations. This seems
increasingly to be the case in our present historical conjuncture, where
what we all appear to perceive to be the accelerating pace of techno-
scientific progression is accompanied by an almost obsessive tendency
to think that progression, to extrapolate from present realities into
an always imminent near future. The generic designation of such a
reflex would be Science Fiction, but this predominantly twentieth-
century cultural form is probably only the symptom of a more general
attitude towards the future, one which might perhaps more usefully
be described as science fabulation. This latter category would include
not only the literary and cinematic representations with which we are
familiar, but also the more general work of speculation that goes on,
both ‘within’ and ‘outside’ the so-called techno-scientific complex,
concerning the future(s) of technology.
If we turn now to a specific example of this configuration — and it
seems to me that this is not any example — then the ‘new’ technology
that offers perhaps one of the most interesting recent case histories of
science fabulation is that of machine translation. It is a fascinating, and
perhaps even crucial, test case because it involves one of the oldest
of human technologies, indeed one of the defining technologies
of human evolution — language — and some of the most powerful
technologies of recent times, technologies of communication, compu-
tation and simulation. It is even more interesting because not only are
these technologies being brought to bear on the question of language,
but on some of the oldest questions about language, questions about
the space between languages, their mutual commensurability and their
mutual translatability — questions which may, in the final analysis, be
the only valid questions to be asked about language. Needless to say,
the idea of machine translation is much older than this new tech-
nology — one thinks, for example, of Descartes’s idea of a ciphering
system or Leibniz’s project for a universal characteristic, which are
both kinds of ‘machine’, if one recognizes in writing a form of technics
coextensive with that of speech. However, it seems to me that the
telos of this technology is expressed most perfectly in an archetypal
 Machine Translation(s) 65
scene, involving the translation of speech rather than writing, which
one finds in the biblical narrative of the Pentecost. In Acts 2, Luke,
the putative author, writes:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and
it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire,
appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were
filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit
gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from very nation under heaven living in
Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because
each one had heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and
astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how
is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes,
Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,
Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and
visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs — in our own
languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed
and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered
and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’1

This kind of passage can, of course, never be interpreted innocently;

it comes down to us pre-loaded, as it were, with centuries of
(Christian) exegesis. However, beyond such overdeterminations, it
could be said to possess a number of structural features which might
help us to pre-think the phenomenon of machine translation. First,
and quite simply, it is a scene, an exemplary scene, and one might
ask whether the event of translation, and within this, the event of
interpretation, can ever be abstracted from the context of a scene.
Second, translation is immediate and immaculate. There are none of
the potential hesitations, approximations, ellipses or misunderstandings
which normally beset more profane acts of communication. Through
the medium of the Holy Spirit a perfect and spontaneous equivalence
of languages is made possible, a symbolic reversal of Babel: each apostle
is able to speak (a) foreign tongue(s) without labour, as if he were
(really) speaking his own;2 he is able to touch the other, immediately,
in the idiom of the other. In this sense, the Holy Spirit functions
as a kind of universal translator, a deus ex machina which solves a
problem of continuity in the biblical narrative: how can the ordinary
and uneducated men who are the disciples of Christ spread the Word
in a world divided by linguistic difference? Third, because of this
66 Paragraph
mechanical solution, as it were, to the problem of linguistic difference,
the intercession of the Holy Spirit must be marked, its passage to earth
and its penetration of the assembled apostles must be announced with
some tangible sign — the violent rush of wind and the divided tongues
of fire resting (if one follows subsequent Christian iconography) on
each of their heads. Finally, there is the divided reaction of the
assembled crowd, the audience that witnesses these acts of speaking
in (other) tongues. Many are amazed and perplexed: the event of
immaculate translation should not be possible, and bears all the marks
of the uncanny — a cognitive readjustment, that of faith, an act of faith,
is necessary to assimilate it. But, as we see at the end of this passage,
there are also some who harbour a residual scepticism: they attempt to
rationalize the event by assimilating the linguistic performance of the
apostles with the ecstatic (but meaningless) utterances of those who
speak in tongues, those who are, they say, filled with wine rather than
the Holy Spirit.
It is this residual scepticism, this doubt concerning the possibility
of immaculate translation, that I would like to pursue in relation
to what is probably the most important technological revolution of
the twentieth-century, the ‘invention’ of the binary computer. The
early applications of computing technology, for example its use in the
breaking of enemy codes during the Second World War, are now
part of the standard history — and, one might argue, mythology — of
contemporary science. We are also familiar with the recursive powers
of the computer turned to mathematical problems hitherto intractable
to the human mind, and the spectacularization of these powers in
the staging of mental contests between human and machine — world
chess champion Gary Kasparov defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997.
More recently, the geometrical (many futurologists say ‘exponential’)
increases in computing power have been applied to the sequencing
of the human genome. Amongst these bifurcating applications of
computing technology, and in view of its apparent ubiquity in the
contemporary technological landscape, one interesting fact is that from
the beginning one of the projected uses of the computer was as a
translating machine. In 1947, there is an exchange of messages between
two of the founders of the information sciences, Warren Weaver and
Norbert Wiener, precisely on this subject. Weaver asks Wiener what
he thinks about ‘mechanical translation’, whether it is possible and how
technically one might approach it. At this stage, Weaver seems to think
that machine translation will be as simple as, for example, decoding a
message. Wiener’s response is categorically a negative one: ‘I frankly
 Machine Translation(s) 67
am afraid the boundaries of words in different languages are too vague,
and the emotional and international connotations are too extensive
to make any quasi-mechanical translation scheme very hopeful.’3 It is
worth noting here that Wiener knew what he was talking about — he
himself was multilingual, as was his father, a specialist in Slavonic
languages.4 To an extent, Wiener’s scepticism was founded: the
subsequent history of machine translation (MT) has been a chequered
one, the technical difficulties of devising programmes capable of
handling text translation between even relatively proximate languages
proving much more difficult than was at first projected. The nadir
of government-funded MT in the US came in the mid-1960s, when
the ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee)
Report concluded that there was no shortage of human translators
and no immediate prospect of MT producing viable translations of
general scientific texts. Since the late 1970s, however, the discipline’s
fortunes have revived somewhat, and it would be difficult to deny
that progress has not been made, even if the goals MT has set
itself are now more modest.5 Today, so-called ‘automatic’ translation
frequently depends upon the implication of a human agent, both
in the ‘pre-editing’ of the source text into a ‘sublanguage’ upon
which the translating programme can operate most effectively, and
in the subsequent ‘post-editing’ of the text the programme produces.
Predictably, the achievements of MT have been most impressive in
the processing of scientific and technical text, where the possibility of
linguistic ambiguity is (in principle) at its lowest. The effectiveness of
such programmes has been enhanced by the introduction of a degree
of reflexivity in their processing of linguistic information, the feedback
mechanism of ‘critiquing systems’, programmes which indicate where
a text deviates from normal language use and which therefore reduce
the need for extensive post-editing.6 Ultimately, it is recognized that
the perfecting of current MT applications and their extension into the
wider ecology of language use requires the integration of ‘real world
knowledge’, in other words, an awareness of context. This, it could
be argued, sets MT on a path convergent with that of AI.
Today, it could be said that the existence of the communication
system named World Wide Web has given additional impetus to
the rationale for MT. The proliferation of the Web, its infiltration
into so many areas of human exchange, is also taking place in many
languages. It is this new Babel, which presents problems for the
navigation but also the control of the Web, which prompted the
information technology magazine Wired to devote a special number
68 Paragraph
to MT in May 2000. In Steve Silberman’s introduction, amongst other
things it is noted that while Anglo-American remains the predominant
international language, on the Web it is in the process of becoming
a minority presence.7 The problem, increasingly, is therefore how
to process the multilingual information that circulates the Web.
Accustomed as we are to the quasi-instantaneity of information,
linguistic difference represents a kind of speed-bump, an opaque and
overdetermined zone resistant to our ambient monolingualism. But
what I find most interesting about this number of Wired is the special
attention devoted to what may be termed the ‘final frontier’ of MT,
so-called ‘speech-to-speech’ translation systems. If text translation
has made tangible progress since the mythical inception of MT in
Weaver’s memorandum to Wiener, then the ultimate challenge is
the design of translating programmes able to handle the chaotic and
irreducibly context-bound domain of human speech. It is here, one
might argue, that science fiction begins, and it is to this question of
speech-to-speech translation that I would like to devote the rest of
this discussion.
Whether it be a question of Pentecost or programme, miracle or
machine, in both cases one is dealing with the same structure: the
elimination of the intermediary. The gift of immaculate translation
dispenses with the mediation of the interpreter, (s)he who intervenes
between the polarities of two languages. The task of the interpreter, as
the etymology of the word suggests, is to negotiate the space between
two parties. The interpreter is the person who opens a channel of
communication between two linguistic monads, closed the one to the
other, with neither doors nor windows. At the same time, the person
who ensures communication can also be the occasion of its perversion
or its loss. If there is always degradation of the information transmitted
through a given channel of communication, if noise always interferes
with the message, then in the case of translation the risk of degradation
and loss is, it could be argued, compounded.8 Those of us who practice
languages, who transact between languages, are aware of the fact that
the interpreter is human, that his or her capacity for comprehension,
concentration and communication is variable and finite. In addition
to this intrinsic imperfection, there is the psychological question of
the interpreter’s intentions — will his or her translation be faithful, to
myself and my interlocutor equally, or will (s)he ‘betray’ me? Finally,
there is the economic question: there are too few interpreters, and it
is their comparative rarity that determines their price. In this respect,
the interpreter is a kind of parasite who profits from the lack of
 Machine Translation(s) 69
communication, but who at the same time is absolutely necessary to
the economy of communication.9 One can see, therefore, what the
ideal, what the telos of MT, textual or speech-to-speech, must be: to
eliminate the third party, to save the time and labour of translation,
to save us from the possibility of human error but also human malice,
to preserve us from the uncertainty of provision — pace the ALPAC
Report, there will always be a shortage of human translators. The
universal translator — in short, the machine — has the advantage of
being always ready to hand, always available. At a more abstract level,
the telos of MT could be seen to be part of a more general movement
which is that of all contemporary technologies of communication: the
reduction of the interface and the immediatization of relations.
What I am interested in here is not simply articulating generalities
about translation and/or interpreting, but also in exploring a certain
history of mentalities and of representations, and how this history
might help us think about translation. I began with the example of a
scene, the scene of Pentecost, because it is perhaps only within the
fictional framing of the scene, of the kind of simulation that the scene
permits, that such questions can be thought through. So I will continue
now with another scene, an exemplary scene, which takes place one
could say at the dawn of the modern period — what increasingly is
being termed the ‘early modern’ period. This scene has always held
a special fascination for me, and I think that it has also in various
ways fascinated other commentators. The scene describes the brief
encounter between Michel de Montaigne and three Brazilian visitors
to France in 1562, and is narrated at the end of his famous essay,
On the Cannibals.10 Appearing in the first volume of Montaigne’s
Essays, the first version of On the Cannibals was written between
1572 and 1580, and the passage in question dates from this period,
therefore between ten and eighteen years after the event narrated.11
This is a true story, in the sense that it is part of the life history of
the individual named Michel de Montaigne. In 1562, at the age of
29, Montaigne was part of the royal entourage that accompanied the
twelve-year-old dauphin Charles IX and his mother Catherine de
Médicis, the regent, to Rouen. This was the first year of the Wars
of Religion — six months previously Rouen had been occupied by
the Protestants, and the Catholic forces under François de Guise had
just retaken the town. The scene is one of devastation, the result of
the massacre, pillaging and settling of accounts which followed the
siege.12 In Montaigne’s essay, this background of devastation is not
described, nor even mentioned. The scene itself is carefully edited,
70 Paragraph
focalized on two dialogues, two interviews, the first between the king
and the three Brazilians, the second between one of the Brazilians and
the young Montaigne:
Three such natives (. . .) were at Rouen at the same time as King Charles IX.
The King had a long interview with them: they were shown our manners, our
ceremonial and the layout of a fair city. Then someone asked them what they
thought of all this and wanted to know what they had been most amazed by.
(. . .) I had a very long talk with one of them (but I used a stupid interpreter
[truchement] who was so bad at grasping my meaning and at understanding my
ideas that I got little joy from it).13

This is therefore a scene of hospitality, of international hospitality,

which for the informed reader is not without a certain irony since it
takes place on a terrain that is devastated by war — civil war, religious
war. And yet, there is no indication that Montaigne is aware of
the irony of this juxtaposition — in the foreground, the dialogue of
international relations, in the background the still smoking remains
of civil strife — even if elsewhere he condemns the war.14 The essay
punctuates this context in such a way that only the two interviews are
visible to us, the public interview with the king and his entourage,
the private interview with Michel Seigneur de Montaigne. The first
interview is, one could say, a unilateral, even ethnocentric exchange,
to the extent that the ‘dialogue’ between European and Brazilian is
restricted to France, its customs and its material culture, the three
visitors then being invited to admire and to comment on what they
have found most striking. Their response, famously, is in the form of a
critique of what they find strange in this example of sixteenth-century
European civilization: the fact that a child should lead a nation and that
such a nation should tolerate gross social inequality.15 The exemplary
nature of this response directly and transparently serves the economy
of Montaigne’s argument in the final part of the essay. This scene
or sequence is also ‘dubbed’, to use the analogy of cinema, because
Montaigne the writer gives us the illusion of a direct discourse, an
immediate dialogue between French and Brazilian, a dialogue without
interruption or intermediary, a dialogue without an interpreter. The
dialogue is conducted, one could say, in a particular sublanguage, the
specialized language of diplomacy and international relations.
The private interview, on the other hand, the interview that takes
place between two individuals, Montaigne and one of the Brazilians,
brings out the fundamental difficulty of intercultural communication,
makes clear the labour and the lengthiness of translation — both
 Machine Translation(s) 71
interviews last a long time — but also its uncertainty, here at its most
radical: if we are to believe the author of the Essays, Montaigne’s
interpreter is a bad interpreter; he cannot properly follow what
Montaigne is saying and his stupidity prevents him from understanding
his ideas. I would like to underline here the possessive mode of the
phrase, ‘I used a(n) interpreter’ (in the original French: j’avois un
truchement), because this seems to me to echo another possessive
formulation, articulated at the start of the essay:
I have long had a man with me who stayed some ten or twelve years in that other
world which was discovered in our century when Villegaignon made his landing
and named it La France Antartique. (. . .) That man of mine [Cet homme que j’avoy]
was a simple, rough fellow — qualities which make for a good witness: those
clever chaps notice more things more carefully but are always adding glosses; they
cannot help changing their story a little in order to make their views triumph and
be more persuasive.16

Montaigne’s man, whom certain commentators assume precisely to

be a truchement (interpreter), thus serves as the faithful witness of
the ethnographic reality of the New World, a reality which other,
more educated witnesses tend to distort through the preconceptions
of their education and the desire to persuade. It is indeed tempting
here to speculate that Montaigne’s man, for all his roughness, would
also have had the advantage over his more educated counterparts of
linguistic competence, that the ten or twelve years that he spent in
Brazil and in contact with the native population would not have
been restricted to the superficial, ocular testimony of ‘those clever
chaps’ (French: les fines gens), but would have been augmented by the
experience of a shared reality through the medium of language. It is
tempting to speculate further that a man of his social category would
be more receptive, more ready to submit himself to the labour of
linguistic apprenticeship, a task which in many ways returns us to the
dependency and vulnerability of childhood. The second language, the
second nature thus acquired would have allowed him a special access
to Tupinamba customs which even an observer as astute as Jean de
Léry, for example, would not (could not) have had.17
Montaigne therefore wants raw facts, raw material that has not
been subjected to the work of interpretation, material that he, Michel
de Montaigne, author of the Essays, will transform into a portrait, a
defense and illustration of the so-called ‘cannibals’. From this point
of view, his man is merely a means to an end, one of a number of
voices in the service of the humanistic message communicated by
72 Paragraph
the essay.18 It is this instrumental relationship — a class relationship,
one might argue — which characterizes the encounter narrated at the
end of the essay. Here, the position of the interpreter is structurally
the same as that of the ‘rough’ witness who appears at the beginning
of the essay. In both cases, the message which arrives from the
New World must be transmitted as it is, without the interference
of the intermediary, who must remain transparent, even invisible.
Given this desire — this demand — for the unmediated, one can guess
Montaigne’s frustration, his exasperation during the scene in question.
For the modern reader, the scene is not without a certain irony,
and even comedy. The young Montaigne has before him the perfect
interlocutor, the perfect witness, a delegate from the New World.
The relationship is face to face, man to man, in terms of social status
even equal to equal — the Brazilian is a ‘captain’ or chief in his own
country.19 There is therefore, it seems, a degree of identification
between the two men, at least on Montaigne’s part. And yet, the
person who ensures communication, the person who must remain
in a sense invisible — the interpreter — suddenly, through his alleged
incompetence, becomes visible. Accustomed as he is to dialoguing
with the ancients in Latin or (less easily) in Greek, finding himself
in the presence of that other exemplary figure of the Essays, the
New World ‘savage’, Montaigne is left virtually speechless. In view of
the time he spends with his witness, the information communicated
to the reader, while serving the ‘argument’ orchestrated at the end
of the essay (social status premised on the noble pursuit of war20 ,
nevertheless seems derisory.
For readers with experience of communication between languages,
with knowledge of the complexities of operating between languages,
and who can appreciate the difficulty of the interpreter’s task — a
taxing task — there are so many questions one could ask about this
scene. Is Montaigne’s interpreter really such a bad interpreter? Is he the
same person who translated the king’s exchanges with the Brazilians?
Who is this person — what is his social status, his background, his
biography? Is he French, Brazilian or of some other nationality? Most
probably French, and most possibly one of the Norman interpreters
(truchements) who frequently mediated between Europeans and the
New World inhabitants. But if he is French, how come he is
unable to follow Montaigne’s French — unless he is unaccustomed to
Montaigne’s Gascon accent? If he is unable to understand Montaigne’s
ideas, does this put him in the same category as the ‘rough’ fellow
cited at the start of the essay? Or should one distinguish between
 Machine Translation(s) 73
the former’s ‘stupidity’ and the latter’s ignorance? Has Montaigne
properly adapted himself to the situation of the mediated interview?
Has he sufficiently pre-edited his questions, as theorists of automatic
translation would say; has he sufficiently restricted these questions to
a sublanguage which would ensure the most reliable translation of
them? Quite simply, is he speaking too fast? (Despite the amount of
time spent with the chief, one can sense on Montaigne’s part a certain
haste, a precipitation, a desire for immediate information.) Finally, is
this simultaneous or consecutive translation?
The questions one could ask about this scene are possibly endless, as
are, more generally, the questions one could ask about the figure of the
interpreter in history: is there a history of interpreting, and given the
structural invisibility of the interpreter, is such a history possible?21 To
conclude this discussion, I would like to ask another question, a rather
artificial question, a sort of hypothesis or thought experiment. What
if, in a near-future scenario, one let Montaigne have his way? What
if, fulfilling his implicit wish, one could eliminate the intermediary,
the human interpreter? What I am projecting here would extend
well beyond the capabilities of contemporary technologies of machine
translation, which always suppose the mediation of the text-oriented
computer screen or the voice recognition/synthesis system. So the
projected technology would eliminate even the interface of sight and
sound, which have been the privileged — hypertrophied — channel of
communication in human evolution. This technology would therefore
be more surgical than those affecting the senses of sight and sound,
plugging directly into the human central nervous system. The model
for this kind of technology can be found, of course, in contemporary
science-fiction cinema, most notably in the Wachowksi brothers’
Matrix films. The technology is both crude and sophisticated to the
extent that the subject is penetrated, jacked into a system of simulation
(David Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ is more explicit in this
sense — the point of penetration is at the base of the spine), immersing
him/her in a total virtual reality mobilizing all of the senses. In this
state of hallucination — consensual hallucination, since the subject is
able to share this virtual reality with another subject, interact with the
other within the simulated space22 — anything, or almost anything,
is possible. In the Wachowksi brothers’ films, especially, this form of
simulation is equally an augmentation of human powers, allowing the
mind to transcend the limits of the human body: skills hitherto not
possessed are instantaneously ‘downloaded’ into the supine subject.23
One might enjoy the kinetic energy, the adrenaline supplement
74 Paragraph
of the virtual scenarios of The Matrix — obviously, at a much less
sophisticated level, we as spectators of the film are ‘plugged in’ to this
circuit of simulation and experience a similar euphoria of movement.
However — and I am sure you will be anticipating my next move — ,
one could also envisage a more intellectual use of this imagined
technology, one which would replace the choreography of combat
with the choreography of culture contact. To return to Montaigne,
let us place (plug) this sixteenth-century French nobleman in(to) the
Matrix, with his cannibal. Within the space of this virtual reality, there
would be the same person-to-person presence, the same face-to-face
interaction; from the point of view of sight, touch, even smell, the
two men would represent for each other the same alterity, the same
exoticism. The only difference would be that they would be freed
from their linguistic monadism: communication would be immediate
and without intermediary. Since this is a science fiction — science
fabulation — one could imagine programming options which would
allow each of the interlocutors to (hear himself) speak in his own
language and to hear the other respond to him in his own language, or
alternatively, to speak in his own language and hear and understand the
other responding to him in the other’s language, or — most uncannily
and perhaps most impossibly — also hear himself speaking the other’s
language, inhabiting it, understanding and feeling it, following its every
inflection and implication. Such knowledge, such intuition, would
be given spontaneously, without the labour of learning, without the
intellectual and linguistic division of labour which the interpreter must
normally endure. And in all of these scenarios, beneath this virtual
reality of communication, at the level of the programme itself a kind
of pure or universal language would be operating, an ‘interlingua’, as
MT theorists call it,24 which would ensure the equivalence and the
authenticity of linguistic exchange.
In the eventuality of such pure communication, of such a gift
of languages, one would therefore ask in which ways Montaigne’s
interview would be advanced. Immeasurably, some would say: once
the linguistic barrier were abolished, in the amount of time available
to him, Montaigne would have been able to collect infinitely more
information on the reality of the New World during the early
modern period. Very little, others might say: even with the invisible
supplement of a universal translator, Montaigne would lack the
necessary enlightenment, the appropriate intellectual tools for asking
the right kind of questions, properly to listen to and understand
the discourse of the other. The translating programme which he
 Machine Translation(s) 75
was plugged into would not free him from the prejudices of his
time. In the final analysis, the unmediated interview would provide
only further generalities, of the same, schematic type as those which
conclude the essay.25 In conclusion, I would like to propose another
possibility: what if the result of this experiment were the paralysis
of the essay-writer? With the gift of immaculate translation, of the
immediate comprehension of his exotic counterpart, could Montaigne
have written — would he have even wanted to write — his essay on
the cannibals?

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
University of Nottingham

NOTES
1 Acts 2: 1–16.
2 Jean Céard indicates the ambiguity of the scene: ‘It is significant to note that
for certain commentators, the gift of languages didn’t actually consist in the
Apostles being able to speak the languages of different nations, but in the
fact that ‘‘each one heard them speaking his own language’’. In other words,
the Apostles were speaking the same language to all of them, but each of
them understood them in their own language’ (‘De Babel à la Pentecôte:
la transformation du mythe de la confusion des langues au XVIe siècle’,
Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 42 (Geneva, Droz, 1980), 593. My
translation).
3 Cited in W. J. Hutchins, Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future (Chichester,
Ellis Horwood, 1986), 25–6. Wiener’s scepticism here is in some ways
reminiscent of the final chapter of Cybernetics, where he expresses his doubts
concerning the extension of the sciences of communication and control
to the domain of the social and human sciences (Cybernetics or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT
Press, 1961).
4 Wiener, Norbert, Ex-Prodigy. My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1964 [1953]), 12–15. I find it somehow appropriate
that the founder of cybernetics should have possessed this multilingual
awareness.
5 See D. Arnold, L. Balkan, et al., Machine Translation. An Introductory Guide
(Manchester and Oxford, NCC Blackwell, 1994), 13–15. Also Makoto
Nagao, Machine Translation: How Far Can It Go?, translated by Norman D.
Cook (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989), 13.
6 For details of definition and terminology, see the ‘Glossary’ of D. Arnold,
L. Balkan, et al., Machine Translation, 209–17, and the entry ‘Machine
76 Paragraph
translation: applications’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited
by Mona Baker, London, Routledge, 2001.
7 ‘Talking to Strangers’, Wired 8.05 (May 2000), www.wired.com/wired/
archive/8.05/translation.html.
8 Of course, one could equally argue that the translator acts as a kind of
filter of ambiguity, a rectifier of imprecision in the transactions between two
languages, ‘tidying up’ the message, as it were. I am not suggesting here that
translation is always a failed exercise but that, as with all communication,
the possibility of failure is intrinsic to it. Hence the desired supplement
of technology.
9 I am drawing here on Michel Serres’s theory of the intermediary articulated
in Le Parasite, which plays upon the dual meaning of the French word
parasite, both ‘parasite’ and, in the language of telecommunications, ‘noise’,
‘interference’. However, Serres does not focus on the case of translation as
such in this book (Le Parasite, Paris, Grasset, 1980; The Parasite, translated by
Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
10 Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, edited by Albert Thibaudet and
Maurice Rat (Paris, Gallimard, 1962), 200–13; The Complete Essays, translated
by M. A. Screech (London, Penguin, 1993), 228–41.
11 Most editions of Montaigne’s Essays distinguish between three stages of the
text, corresponding to the first edition of 1580, the second edition of 1588
and the final (posthumous) edition of 1595. The closing sequence of On the
Cannibals, with which we are concerned here, belongs entirely to the first
stage, thus the 1580 edition.
12 On this scene of devastation, see Franck Lestringant, Le Cannibale: grandeur et
décadence (Paris, Perrin, 1994), 23–4. Apparently, Montaigne himself did not
participate in the siege (Géralde Nakam, Montaigne et son temps: les évenements
et les Essais (Paris, A.-G. Nizet, 1982), 115, note 15).
13 The Complete Essays, 241; Œuvres complètes, 213.
14 For example, earlier in On the Cannibals, and also in 1.23, On habit: and on
never easily changing a traditional law.
15 The Complete Essays, 240–1; Œuvres complètes, 212–13. The Brazilians’
comment about social inequality is interestingly phrased in the idiom of the
Tupi language: ‘secondly, since they have an idiom in their language which
calls all men ‘‘halves’’ of one another — that they had noticed that there were
among us men fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their halves were
begging at their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it
odd that those destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did
not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses’ (ibid.). In this
first interview the interpreter has clearly made a good job of conveying the
subtleties of the Tupi tongue.
16 The Complete Essays, 228, 231; Œuvres complètes, 200, 202.
 Machine Translation(s) 77
17 The protestant convert Jean de Léry’s account of his stay with the Brazilian
Tupinamba, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578) is rightly
considered a masterpiece of early ethnographic literature, but despite his
dedicated efforts to learn Tupi, much of his information seems to be mediated
through various Norman interpreters who lived with the Tupinamba.
18 The voices are many, and manifestly extend beyond the verbal testimony of
the simple servant privileged at the start of the essay: André Thevet, Jean
de Léry and Lopez de Gomara being the textual authorities most frequently
cited in the secondary literature on the essay.
19 The Complete Essays, 241; Œuvres complètes, 213.
20 Ibid.
21 Lawrence Venuti has attempted a history of text translation in The Translator’s
Invisibility. A History of Translation (London, Routledge, 1994), but gives
very little attention to interpreting as such. There is an interesting study of
the representation of the figure of the interpreter in the sixteenth century
in Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud’s ‘La figure de l’interprète dans quelques
récits de voyage français à la Renaissance’ (in Voyager à la Renaissance, edited
by Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris, Editions Maisonneuve et
Larose, 1987), 319–35). Gomez-Géraud suggests that representations of the
interpreter during this period are ‘far from positive. One could even argue
that the more one speaks about the interpreter, the more the image given
of him is a bad one’ (320. My translation). She points out that New World
interpreters, in particular, were the object of mistrust, as they were suspected
(sometimes quite rightly) of manipulating the translating situation to their
own people’s advantage. Even the European truchements, who had assimilated
to the indigenous cultures and who were therefore linguistically the most
reliable interpreters, were suspect, as they were often seen to exercise a similar
partiality (321–3).
22 The term ‘consensual hallucination’ originates in William Gibson’s Neuro-
mancer (London, Harper Collins, 1995 [1984]). Gibson’s book had a direct
influence on science-fiction films such as The Matrix.
23 On the download as wish-fulfilment, see Exploring the Matrix: Visions of
the Cyber Present, edited by Karen Haber (Byron Preiss Visual Publications,
2003), 195, 208–9, 221.
24 ‘Historically earlier, the interlingua approach represents a theoretically purer
answer to the drawbacks of the first-generation approach. Since an essen-
tially word-for-word approach maximizes the interference from the source
language, it was thought that a representation which completely neutralized
the idiosyncrasies of the source language would offer a solution. Thus, the
interlingual representation is an abstract representation of the meaning of the
source text, capturing all and only the linguistic information necessary to
generate an appropriate target text, with no undue influence from the original
text. This turns out to be very difficult to achieve in practice, however.’
78 Paragraph
(‘Machine translation: methodology’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies. See also D. Arnold, L. Balkan, et al., Machine Translation, 80–4).
25 Lévi-Strauss articulates this dilemma in Tristes tropiques, where, lamenting the
fact of the historical dispersion and disappearance of South American cultures,
he realizes that living in the century of de Léry and Thevet would not have
advanced his research, as he would not have possessed the knowledge and
reflexivity of the contemporary observer (Tristes tropiques (Paris, Plon, 1955),
43; Tristes tropiques, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (New York,
Penguin Books USA, 1992), 43).