People often use the word "translator" to cover both people who translate texts and simultaneous interpreters, i.e. those people who translate while someone else is speaking. There's a pretty big distinction between those two. The latter is immensely more difficult.
Quite early on, we took on the question of Universal Translators. A universal translator is effectively a hand-wave or gimmick, something designed to make the story workable when it just wouldn't be possible to deal with the story content without having everyone speak the same language. Douglas Adams' babelfish is a deliberate nod to the arbitrariness of this idea. Translation problems are complex, and frankly, can take over a great deal of the content of your story, so if you don't want to have to deal with those issues, positing a universal translator is one way to just set them aside. This isn't a problem for the story, necessarily (although I do like to engage more deliberately with language issues). It's similar in some ways to saying "these people have faster-than-light travel and I'm not going to bother telling you how it works." Sometimes that's what you do to get the story focus right.
Obviously, there are stories that focus more deliberately on language issues. Little Fuzzy is one example. C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series is another.
One key thing to remember is that translation is not a magical equalizer.
Star Trek tends to minimize the importance of culture and manners. It will feature them, but usually as something cute or somehow to be tolerated. Morgan noted that they often act as if there is no misstep that could similarly offend humans.
We talked briefly about the movie Arrival. I noted that they skip over any exposition of the actual process it takes to "crack" the language and start designing the computer program that assigns meanings to the forms.
Kat noted that there is an open-source machine translation project going on right now on the internet, called Festival.
We liked the way that the show Enterprise had treated translation, where they had linguist Hoshi Sato on board for linguistic work, and only a semi-functional universal translator.
Kat remarked there are usually three approaches to language in SF/F: 1. conlang like mad (build your own language), 2. universal translator, and 3. "oh, look, languages."
We spoke about Embassytown by China Miéville. This book had a very cool language concept where the aliens spoke with two mouths and could only be translated to by pairs of psychically linked twins.
We talked also about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has played a role in many stories and films including Arrival. The "strong form" of the hypothesis says that if a concept doesn't exist in your language, then you can't conceptualize it. This form of it is not valid. However, the "weak form" of the hypothesis says that your language influences your cognition and makes certain things easier to conceptualize than others. This has proven to have some validity. Indeed, there is a researcher at Stanford, Lera Boroditsky, who is actively studying the relationship between language and cognition. They have a "Language and cognition" lab. (cool stuff!)
The linguistic concept that underlies the idea of the universal translator (at least in its original form) is that of Chomskyan universal grammar, which says that all languages have underlying commonalities in their construction. This has not proven to be the case, however, and I have always found universal translators to be something of a conceit.
Kat told us that she had learned the words for older brother and older sister in Japanese as if they were defaults, and that once her mom asked her why her friends were all younger siblings. It was a linguistic side-effect of how she had learned the vocabulary.
In languages with gendered nouns, the gender of those nouns often changes the way that their meaning is framed, causing people to emphasize gendered characteristics in them. We wondered what would happen if you were bilingual in two languages that assigned genders differently to the same nouns.
One of the problems with translation is that translators (not universal translators) have bodies. This means they can become tired. Or they can be threatened. They can make mistakes, or be coerced. These issues are not always taken on in stories. The indigenous translator who became known as La Malinche was ostensibly "married" to Hernán Cortés, but I'm pretty sure that relationship was at least somewhat coercive.
Is there a temperament for interpretation? Kat says you have to be willing to be a conduit for language, and be as transparent as possible, as if you were a machine with none of your own thoughts. This is certainly an ethical quandary that Sheila Finch takes on in her Guild of Xenolinguists stories. How much can you ask someone to dehumanize themselves in the name of getting something done? We thought about the difficult situations faced by children in immigrant communities who have to translate for their parents. Sometimes they can be asked to translate things that might get them in trouble (like discipline documents from the school). There would be a sore temptation to protect yourself by mistranslating. Even when you try to make yourself as transparent as possible, your choice of word will still reflect your judgment (whether you want it to or not).
We talked about the challenge faced by people who are trying to translate Donald Trump speeches. Samantha Bee and the Daily Show both did segments on this, showing how difficult the job is. In Japanese, one might try to be excessively casual to represent him, but that's not enough. Also, you could easily precipitate an international incident.
There are stories from the Cold War about non-accurate translations that were made in order to save people's lives.
Politeness and honesty are often at odds.
We often assume that we have enough in common with the people we want to talk to that we can gesture and find things in common. This is not always the case, and certainly would not be the case with aliens.
Shared context is essential. If you are interacting with aliens who don't recognize objects as separate from each other, one of the major underlying assumptions of human language would not apply, and this would cause major problems.
Thanks to everyone who participated. Today's hangout will meet at 10am Pacific and we're going to talk about Naming. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
No comments:
Post a Comment