Translation in the Digital Age

Michael Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135104313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation is living through a period of revolutionary upheaval. The effects of digital technology and the internet on translation are continuous, widespread and profound. From automatic online translation services to the rise of crowdsourced translation and the proliferation of translation Apps for smartphones, the translation revolution is everywhere. The implications for human languages, cultures and society of this revolution are radical and far-reaching. In the Information Age that is the Translation Age, new ways of talking and thinking about translation which take full account of the dramatic changes in the digital sphere are urgently required.

Michael Cronin examines the role of translation with regard to the debates around emerging digital technologies and analyses their social, cultural and political consequences, guiding readers through the beginnings of translation's engagement with technology, and through to the key issues that exist today.

With links to many areas of study, Translation in the Digital Age is a vital read for students of modern languages, translation studies, cultural studies and applied linguistics.

1 The house of translation

In the introduction to his treatise On the Use of the Astrolabe, the twelfth-century scholar and translator Adelard of Bath has some words of advice for his patron Prince Henry, the future King Henry II:

You say that whoever dwells in a house is not worthy of its shelter if he is ignorant of its material and makeup, quantity and quality, position and peculiarity. Thus if one who was born and raised in the palace of the world should forbear after the age of discretion to know the reason for so marvelous a beauty, he is unworthy of it and, were it possible, ought to be cast out.

(Lyons 2010: 128–29)

Adelard is instructing his young pupil in the use of an instrument that will radically change the fortunes of travellers from the Christian West. His treatise is itself the fruit of years of translating from Arabic and a demonstration of the technical superiority of the Arab world. What is notable is that the metaphors the scholar employs are those of the built environment: ‘house’, ‘palace’, ‘material’, ‘makeup’. In other words, Adelard's defence of a new form of maritime technology is couched in the language of an existing technology, the technology of human construction, the house or the palace, which provides ‘shelter’. For Adelard, understanding resides in knowing how the world works and that knowledge is inexpressible outside the language of artefacts. What his translations ultimately do is change the relationship between his readers and their world not so much through the words he writes, as through the new instrument he will cause them to use and understand. Human presence in the world can only be understood through and in the context of the made objects that mediate human existence.

Tools

So why are tools so fundamental to a sense of what it is to be human, and what possible significance can this have for how we understand translation? The archaeologist Timothy Taylor points out that there are many good reasons why human beings should not exist:

Our skulls are so large that we risk being stuck and dying even as we are struggling to be born. Helped out by a technical team — obstetrician, midwife, and a battery of bleeping machines — the unwieldy cranium is followed into the light by a pathetic excuse for a mammalian body, screaming, hairless and so muscularly feeble that it has no chance of supporting its head properly for months. How did a species in which basic reproduction is so easily fatal, and whose progeny need several years of adult support before they can dress themselves, not just evolve but become the dominant species on the planet?

(Taylor 2010: 4)

Not only have humans become the dominant species on the planet, but they inhabit almost every conceivable environment from mountain plateaux to (however temporarily) the sea floor. So how do these members of the animal kingdom, with their weak eyes, fragile backs, and infant helplessness, come to occupy a situation of such pre-eminence? One answer must reside in what Taylor terms the ‘third system’. The first system comprises the system of physics and nonbiological chemistry, the second system is that of biology, and the third system is the set of material objects created and shaped by human beings (ibid., 4–6). Evolution for humans is, in a sense, both biological and cultural. If we possess fire, tools, weapons, and clothes, we no longer need massive teeth, claws, and muscles, or a long, vegetable-absorbing gut. This permits humans to wrong foot conventional laws of natural selection which would dictate the inevitable disappearance of a notably fragile and vulnerable species of great ape.

What emerges from this reading of human evolution, the paradoxical survival of the weakest, is that third-system dependency leads to a particular symbiosis of the animate and inanimate. The trebling or quadrupling of human brain capacity which enabled the expansion and elaboration of the third system is itself the product of developments in the system itself. Changes in cooking, fermenting, and curing allowed for important gains in calorific value which enabled humans to absorb the high-energy, high-protein foods necessary to power large brains. These brains were and are perched on unusually short lengths of gut, a side-effect of the switch to upright walking (Wrangham 2007: 182–203). Thus, biology and technē interact in a manner central to human survival and development. It is the artificial realm that insulates us, cures and makes up for the deficiencies in our sight, metabolism, mobility, and memory. For this reason, when we speak about translation as a human activity, we need to take account of the intrinsic, and not simply extrinsic, involvement of technē. It is a question of ontology, rather than of utility. We evolve or are defined by the artefacts we use. The tools shape us as much as we shape them.

In assigning tools the importance they deserve in human evolution, it also necessary to contextualize tool use. Tools are used by human beings for specific purposes, and these purposes, from the provision of food to the transport of infants, are predominantly social. One of the difficulties faced by humans, once they were erect, was that they had to transport defenceless infants. These infants were born prematurely, in that they could not feed themselves, transport themselves, or defend themselves against predators without the assistance of adult humans. Bipedalism greatly enhanced human mobility, the distances that could be covered running or on foot, but the resultant pelvic modification meant that caring for the bipedal young demanded social cohesion so that the group could protect and defend the young who would transmit, in turn, these patterns of socialization (Coppens and Picq 2001). The need for social interaction is constant if survival is to be a possibility. The impulse towards social cohesion does not, however, imply that human societies are condemned to regimes of exclusive inwardness.

A constant of marriage arrangements in different human communities is that, if they do not always stipulate whom you should marry, they have strict rules about whom you should not (Héran 2009). Marriage rules are generally based on a scalar model going from, at one end, a too-great proximity (for example, the taboo on incest in many societies), to an excessive distance (marrying someone from a wholly alien culture) at the other. The complex interaction between kinship ties and spatial obligations (whether the couple will live with the family of the man or of the woman) means that the potential to extend the social exists in both group and spatial terms (Godelier 2004). Hence, the notion of what constitutes the social group is both extended by the nature of marriage arrangements and defined by them. Paradoxically, as Christian Grataloup argues, prohibition is the flip side of the perpetual need to create links, to generate social connectedness. Linking the prehistoric necessity of collective childcare to the complex grid of kinship possibilities, Grataloup argues that:

Constant interaction is necessary between the members of the same group, precisely to reproduce on an ongoing basis the social link. Distance hinders these possibilities for interaction. If one member of the society is too far from the others, there is a danger that he or she will become wholly autonomous. The social is based on a whole web of links, a whole system of connections, kinship structures, languages, relations of production and power … These interactions cannot tolerate distance or being over-stretched.

(Grataloup 2011: 44–45)¹

The risk in prioritizing the role of tools is to fall into the trap of a techno-determinism which ignores the profoundly social nature of humans' interaction with each other and the world. It is significant, however, from the point of view of translation, how that sociality has been characterized throughout human history. On the one hand, there is the search for group cohesion, the necessary trade-off between bipedal mobility and bipedal survival, and, on the other, the countless arrangements to extend and diversify the nature of what constitutes the social. Seeing translation as a kind of cultural kinship arrangement, a way of complexifying the constitutive relationships of a community, is one way of keeping in focus the abiding necessity of the ‘social link’ as a context for tool use, a link which, as we shall see in succeeding chapters, extends globally through the internet.

Entailment

One way of capturing this notion of tool dependence is to invoke the notion of entailment. A classic contemporary example of entailment is the modern car:

A car needs wheels and fuel. These entail rubber plantations and oil wells, and complex manufacturing, refining, marketing and distribution processes. Once all the things that cars have to have to be cars are factored in — from metal, tarmac, and glass, through to traffic police, a licensing bureaucracy, test agencies and so on, each of which comes with its own primary and subsidiary systems of entailment — it is clear that the car can exist only within a modern globalized industrial system.

(Taylor 2010: 51; his emphasis)

The difficulty with entailment is that it is implicit rather than explicit, and, for most of the time, it is not in fact clear to most people that a car can exist only within a modern globalized industrial system. The system is taken for granted, a naturalized given in the contemporary setting. In considering translation in the context of entailment, it is worth making a distinction between what might be termed primary entailment and secondary entailment. To illustrate the difference, we will look briefly at the history of one of the most famous translation artefacts, currently held in the British Museum in London, the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele from ancient Egypt inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V. Three scripts are used in the decree, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script, and ancient Greek. Designed to re-establish the rule of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt, the stele was erected after the coronation of King Ptolemy V and was inscribed with a decree which established the divine cult of the new ruler. Though the texts in three scripts diverge, there are substantial similarities between them, similarities that enabled scholars such as Jean-François Champollion and Robert Young to begin to unravel the meanings of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The decree ends with the instruction that a copy be placed in every temple, inscribed in the ‘language of the gods’ (hieroglyphs), the ‘language of documents’ (demotic), and the ‘language of the Greeks’, the language of the Ptolemaic government (Andrews 1985: 3–5). Though it is difficult to ascertain whether one of the texts was the standard version from which the other two were translated, the coexistence of the three scripts is material evidence of the translation zone that was Ptolemaic Egypt.

In the case of the Rosetta Stone, primary entailment is the system which allows the stele to be created and to exist in a meaningful context. There are the tools and processes of extraction which allow the rock to be extracted from a grandiorite quarry; the forms of carriage and locomotion that will allow a stele weighing more than 800 kilos (the Rosetta Stone, an incomplete stele, weighs 760 kilos; ibid., 7) to be brought to a site; the built infrastructure (the temples) which house the steles; the artisans who will prepare the stone and carve the inscriptions on the surface of the stele. Implicit in the instruction that steles be placed in temples throughout the territory ruled by Ptolemy V is a whole technical infrastructure, a system of primary entailment, without which his decree would be null and void, invisible to everyone and understood by no one.

Secondary entailment is the manner in which the Rosetta Stone becomes integrated into a later process of decipherment and translation, a process that would revolutionize understanding of the ancient Egyptian world (Adkins and Adkins 2000; Ray 2007). By this we mean that later descriptions and analyses of life in ancient Egypt would be heavily dependent on the scholarship of Champollion, Young, and others, which provides the translation key to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and whose work is distributed through the scholarly and print infrastructure of two competing empires, the French and the British. In other words, at both the original moment of the erection of Ptolemy V's decree and the subsequent translation of the texts carried on the stele, there are implicit systems of entailment that allow texts to function in multilingual contexts. Understanding the full force of the Ptolemaic decree entails the material manifestation of a decree in three scripts in particular sites and the existence of a professional class to translate the royal decree into the appropriate scripts, just as understanding ancient Egypt entails the physical dissemination of a translation enterprise undertaken by a scholarly class in nineteenth-century Europe. In both instances, translation emerges against the backdrop of entailment, and translation in turn becomes a form of entailment, something without which so much else cannot happen. In detailing the idiomatic use of the term ‘Rosetta Stone’ in English, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that it refers to a key to the process of decryption of encoded information, more particularly, when a small but representative sample is recognized as the clue to understanding a larger whole (Stevenson 2010: 786). When we examine the Rosetta Stone itself from the point of entailment, what is apparent is that the object itself, symbol of, and aid to, a culture of translation, is the clue to understanding a larger whole, the entire web of human-technē interaction presupposed by systems of entailment.

Central to the notion of entailment in this context is the control or mastery of distance. The domestication and selective breeding of certain animals such as horses and dromedaries had significant spatial consequences for the cultures that were able to avail themselves of these techniques. Indeed, such was the enduring importance of the spatial revolution brought about by the use of particular animals that, as David Edgerton has pointed out in the The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2006: 71), Hitler invaded Russia with more horses than Napoleon. In later centuries, it was the invention of steam-powered machines that would revolutionize humans' relationship to space. A changing relationship to space is primarily about a changing relationship to proximity and distance. It becomes easier to go further. Going further is not, however, just about breeding the right horse or inventing the perfect machine. The mastery of distance implies an infrastructure which gives effective form to the possibility of a mode of transport, whether animal or human. Roads, bridges, ports — and later, railways, airports and information superhighways — are the essential components of systems of transportation. Covering distance becomes infinitely more problematic over a terrain with no road, or for a computer user with no access to a network. Implicit in the form of entailment represented by the infrastructure of transport are the twin components of organization and information. The emergence of a postal service in the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was heavily dependent on the existence of a more explicitly organized imperial administration. It was not enough to have the roads, the bridges, and the horses, it was also necessary to have a body which could organize a coherent, functioning network over great distances (Gazagnadou 1994). Organization is only effective, however, if you know what it is you are going to organize. It is necessary to know where the roads and bridges and ports are, if they exist, and, if they do not, where they need to be built, what the terrain is like, and who lives close by. Geographical, cultural, and political information is integral to the conquest of distance. When the Christian West embarks on a course of expansion, translators will be crucial to the acquisition of Arab cartographical knowledge which informed voyages of conquest and discovery (Lyons 2010). This knowledge was itself the product of the organizational and informational needs of an Islamic empire that at its height covered vast physical distances. The difficulty with mastering distance is that distance can exercise its own mastery. Herein lies an anxiety that has troubled translation and technology for centuries and is still very much part of contemporary debates on the internet, an anxiety that relates to what we might call the ethics of proximity.

Proximity

Valerius Maximus, the first-century CE Roman writer, noted that interpreters placed a distance between the Senate and the power of Greek rhetoric (in McElduff 2009: 145, n29). In seeking to master or overcome the distance between Latin and Greek, the interpreters created more distance between speakers and listeners, listeners who were thus distanced from the full force of the Greek rhetoric. Cicero shared Maximus' unease about the distance created by translation between the audience and the original utterance, but it is the historians Polybius and Livy who underline the fraught nature of translation as a means to overcome linguistic and cultural distance. Polybius in his Histories (20.9–10) and Livy in his From the Founding of the City/Ab urbe condita (36.28) speak of the calamitous consequences of the mistranslation of a word for the Greek Aetolians in 191 BCE. The Greek word pistis and the Latin fides taken out of context can mean more or less the same thing: faith or trust. When the Aetolians surrendered into the fides of the Roman people, they did not realize that in the specific context of conflict, this meant the unconditional surrender of all of one's people, goods, and lands. The distance between languages that had been overcome through the act of translation only revealed the much greater distance between two cultures or peoples in their understanding of what was entailed by particular words in specific contexts. In other words, what the Roman writers are exercised by, in an empire whose very existence is predicated on the centrality of organization and information, is whether the techniques and infrastructure of spatial compression do not need to be tempered by an ever vigilant ethics of proximity. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the translation age
• 1 The house of translation
• 2 Plain speaking
• 3 Translating limits
• 4 Everyware
• 5 Details
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index