Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

GT could not work without a very large preexisting corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labor of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours. Google’s own promotional video doesn’t dwell on this at all. At present it offers two-way translation between fifty-eight languages, that is to say, 3,306 separate translation services, more than have ever existed in all human history to date. Most of these translation relations—IcelandicFarsi, YiddishVietnamese, and dozens more—are the newborn offspring of GT: there is no history of translation between them, and therefore no paired texts, on the Web or anywhere else. Google’s presentation of its service points out that given the huge variations among languages in the amount of material its program can scan to find solutions, translation quality varies according to the language pair involved.[149] What it does not highlight is that GT is as much the prisoner of global flows in translation as we all are. Its admirably smart probabilistic computational system can offer 3,306 translation directions only by using the same device as has always assisted intercultural communication: pivots, or intermediary languages. It’s not because Google is based in California that English is the main pivot. If you use statistical methods to compute the most likely match between languages that have never been matched directly before, you must use the pivot that can provide matches with both target and source.

The service that Google offers appears to flatten and diversify interlanguage relations beyond the wildest dreams of even the EU’s most enthusiastic language-parity proponents. But it is able to do so only by exploiting, confirming, and increasing the central role played by the most widely translated language in the world’s electronic databank of translated texts, which can only be the most consistently translated language in all other media, too.

A good number of English-language detective novels, for example, have probably been translated into both Icelandic and Farsi. They thus provide ample material for finding matches between sentences in the two foreign languages; whereas Persian classics translated into Icelandic are surely far fewer, even including those works that have themselves made the journey by way of a pivot such as French or German. This means that John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT’s Icelandic–Farsi translation device than Halldór Laxness or Rumi ever will. And the real wizardry of Harry Potter may well lie in his hidden power to support translation from Hebrew into Chinese.

GT-generated translations themselves go up on the Web and become part of the corpus that GT scans, producing a feedback loop that reinforces the probability that the original GT translation was acceptable. But it also feeds on human translators, since it always asks users to suggest a better translation than the one it provides—a loop pulling in the opposite direction, toward greater refinement. It’s an extraordinarily clever device. I’ve used it myself to check I had understood a Swedish sentence more or less correctly, for example, and it is used automatically as a Webpage translator whenever you use a search engine. Of course, it may also produce nonsense. However, the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognize nonsense.) Human translators, on the other hand, produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can’t tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source—in which case you don’t need the translation at all.

If you remain attached to the idea that a language really does consist of words and rules and that meaning has a computable relationship to them (a fantasy to which many philosophers still cling), then GT is not a translation device. It’s just a trick performed by an electronic bulldozer allowed to steal other people’s work. But if you have a more open mind, GT suggests something else.