Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Conference interpreters can often guess ahead of what a speaker is saying because speakers at international conferences repeatedly use the same formulaic expressions. Similarly, an experienced translator working in a familiar domain knows without thinking that certain chunks of text have standard translations that she can slot in. At an even more basic level, any translator knows that there are some regular transpositions between the two languages she is working with—the French impersonal pronoun on, for example, will almost always require the English sentence to be in the passive; adjectives following a noun in French will need to be put in front of the equivalent English noun; and so on. These automatisms come from practice and experience. Translators don’t reinvent hot water every day, and they don’t recalculate the transformation “French on English passive construction” each time it occurs. They behave more like GT—scanning their own memories in double-quick time for the most probable solution to the issue at hand. GT’s basic mode of operation is much more like professional translation than is the slow descent into the “great basement” of pure meaning that early machine-translation developers imagined.

GT is also a splendidly cheeky response to one of the great myths of modern language studies. It was claimed, and for decades it was barely disputed, that what was so special about a natural language was that its underlying structure allowed an infinite number of different sentences to be generated by a finite set of words and rules. A few wits pointed out that this was no different from a British motorcar plant capable of producing an infinite number of vehicles each one of which had something different wrong with it—but the objection didn’t make much impact outside Oxford. GT deals with translation on the basis not that every sentence is different but that anything submitted to it has probably been said before. Whatever a language may be in principle, in practice it is used most commonly to say the same things over and over again. There is a good reason for that. In the great basement that is the foundation of all human activities, including language behavior, we find not anything as abstract as “pure meaning” but common human needs and desires. All languages serve those same needs, and serve them equally well. If we do say the same things over and over again, it is because we encounter the same needs and feel the same fears, desires, and sensations at every turn. The skills of translators and the basic design of GT are, in their different ways, parallel reflections of our common humanity.

In September 2009, the new administration in the White House issued a science policy road map, titled A Strategy for American Innovation. The last section of this document calls for science and technology to be harnessed to address the “‘Grand Challenges’ of the 21st Century,” of which it gives half a dozen examples, such as solar cells “as cheap as paint” and intelligent prosthetics. The last line of the whole strategy puts among these long-range targets for national science policy the development of “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world—greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.”[150] Not every science policy target is achieved, but with serious backing from the U.S. administration now in place for the first time since 1960, machine translation is likely to advance far beyond the state in which we currently know it.

TWENTY-FOUR A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting

Speech predates writing by eons, and oral translation is far, far older than the written kind. Because speech is such an ephemeral thing—it’s gone in a puff of warm air, which is all it is in the material sense—nothing can be known directly about speech translation for almost the entire duration of its history. Two things caused a huge change in the twentieth century: the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and a political need of the most pressing kind.