The Babelfish Tartuffe
Here’s something your won’t hear at the Translation Automation User Society: Molière’s classic French comedy “Tartuffe“ as translated into English by the Alta Vista’s Babelfish internet language translator and the result performed by French actors in Dublin.
I attended “The Babelfish Tartuffe” today as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival ‘07, and it was truly wonderful - if more than slightly weird. However, just like the tiresome Chinglish examples we so often hear about, I had no problem figuring out the plot.
The use of Babelfish, according to the director, Jaimie Carswell, brings a new perspective on Walter Benjamin’s observation about the emergence of a new global language where “all information, all sense, and all intention are extinguished.”
In the technology infused world of “The Babelfish Tartuffe”, everyone was speaking the same language, but making no sense. Language itself, like Tartuffe, is an imposter as jargon and technical terms take over from any concrete reality. Worth thinking about as you try to catch up with the latest Web 2.0 phrase du jour.
If the play comes to your town, then I recommend you see it. This is one instance when controlled authoring really would have detracted from the resulting machine translation!
Machine translation tends to produce ridiculous results, everybody knows that. But I don’t understand how that supports the argument that our world is “technology infused” or that “jargon and technical terms take over from any concrete reality”.
Then again, I didn’t see the play. It seems like an original idea.
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura on 09/14 at 03:05 AM"Machine translation tends to produce ridiculous results, everybody knows that.”
I disagree. If you use MT like the Babelfish Tartuffe, then you will get poor results. That said if you throw a flowery, domain-specific text at a human translator who doesn’t have the rules and terms either, the result isn’t exactly brilliant either, is it?
Posted by Ultan on 09/14 at 10:18 AM
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