Interesting post! This comment is going to be more some random thoughts I had while reading than a proper response.
First, translations of Shakespeare is a super interesting arena. No Fear Shakespeare ‘translates’ the original plays into modern English, which I admit is a helpful idea, but there’s a problem with these beyond just the feeling of being juvenile: the ‘translations’ are often wrong, sometimes blatantly so. One such line I remember well is from Hamlet. The original is:
Horatio, or I do forget myself!
which became
Nice to see you again, Horatio—that is your name, right?
The No Fear Shakespeare version has clearly translated this as if it were, “Horatio—or do I forget myself?” (all punctuation in Shakespeare is arbitrary, so the important thing here is “I do” vs “do I”). The NFS version makes absolutely no sense in the context of the play, because Horatio is Hamlet’s best friend! At the time of this meeting they haven’t seen each other in a few months, but the reason Horatio is in Denmark at all is to be a companion to Hamlet, because they’re BFFs. Hamlet definitely fucking knows his name. My interpretation of the original line is something like “Welcome Horatio, who I would as soon forget as my own self,” i.e. basically the exact opposite of what NFS said.
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Why are modern translations so narrow? What level of nuance would you like them to capture? A lot of the beauty—and a lot of the meaning—in Shakespeare is in the specific use of language (rhythm, imagery, sound, antithesis, repetition, et cetera). Arguably you just can’t get every iota of the meaning out of Shakespeare without the exact original words. So it seems like it necessarily has to be a spectrum. (Incidentally this reminds me of the question of whole brain emulation: at what level of resolution does the emulation have sufficient fidelity to ‘be’ you, if you can’t replicate the entire brain quark for quark?)
In translations of poetry—something I have amateur experience with—you have a lot of decisions to make. Do you try to preserve both the meter and the rhyme scheme? That already severely restricts your choice of words, making it harder to get across the explicit meaning. And then what about alliteration, assonance, in-rhymes? What about double (or triple) meanings? (when these latter take a backseat the omitted meaning is often added as a footnote or annotation). What if there’s cultural information that doesn’t carry over well to your intended audience? And if you’ve taken all the foregoing considerations into account, what’s the likelihood that it’s even possible for you to end up with something that feels true to the original (in the sense that poetry evokes certain images and emotions)?
There’s a great scene in Henry IV Part 2 that’s almost entirely sexual puns*. If you had to write a Spanish version of this scene, would it be better to preserve the literal (primary) meaning of each line? Or should you write a new scene that has the same basic plot, but where you’re at liberty to change the literal meanings of the lines so you can fit in more sexual puns that actually make sense in Spanish? From what I’ve seen most translators choose the former (though perhaps this is specific to Shakespeare due to the crazy reverence in which people hold his works). I think this is a mistake artistically, but also there’s clearly a trade-off here. Without incredibly intensive labor, you can’t have it both ways.
I don’t know much about ML so perhaps it would be a lot easier for it to solve these problems than it is for a human. But given the current strategy of training on corpora, and the fact that I doubt there are more than a handful of good examples of how to balance all of these considerations, I’m not sure how an ML system would learn to do it. But again, I’m not a computers person.
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Although I was talking about poetry, I think a lot of the same broad considerations apply to the idea of personalized translations (e.g. of Wikipedia). I can see an ML system learning my idiolect just by listening to me 24⁄7, but learning where my inferential distances are (for lack of better phrasing) seems quite a lot harder? Though… perhaps I am just underestimating GPT-N?
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*The link doesn’t do it justice at all, but just for example look at the words ‘stab’, ‘enter’, ‘lusty’, and ‘fist’, and the delightful line ‘do me, do me, do me your offices’.
No Fear Shakespeare ‘translates’ the original plays into modern English, which I admit is a helpful idea, but there’s a problem with these beyond just the feeling of being juvenile: the ‘translations’ are often wrong, sometimes blatantly so.
Agreed that translations are often wrong, but I don’t think this is reason to give up on them! Translations between languages often fail, but I’m thankful we have them.
The alternative to translation that I was taught in school about Shakespeare was to just give us the source and have us figure it out. I’m absolutely sure we did a terrible job at it, even worse than that bad translation. I don’t remember ever having a lesson on how to translate Early Modern English to Modern English. I think I barely understood how large the difference was, let alone interpreted it correctly.
My knowledge on this topic comes from the Great Courses course “The Story of Language” by John McWhorter. Lecture 7 is great and goes into detail on the topic.
“We don’t process Shakespeare as readily as we often suppose. With all humility I think there is a kind of mythology—a bit of a hoax—surrounding our reception of Shakespeare as educated people. And I will openly admit that, except when I have read a Shakespeare play—and this is particularly the tragedies—when I go and hear it, cold, at normal speed, I don’t understand enough to make the evening worth it.
“I don’t like to admit it—I learned long ago that you’re not supposed to say so—but it’s true. And even as somebody who loves languages and is familiar with English and all its historical layers, I have seen The Tempest not once, not twice, but three times, never having gotten down to reading that particular play, I have never known what in the world was going on in that play.
“And I seriously doubt if I am alone. And it’s not that the language is poetry. Poetry’s fine. It’s because Shakespeare in many ways was not writing in the language that I am familiar with. It’s been many many centuries and the language has changed.
“One friend of mine said that the only time he had gone to Shakespeare and really genuinely understood it the way we understand a play by O’Neal or by Tony Kushner is when he saw Hamlet in France because it was in relatively modern French and he was very good at French.”
Since we’re basically just on a Shakespeare tangent now, and I really like talking about Shakespeare—I was lucky to have an extremely thorough education in Early Modern English starting from a very young age (starting around 7, I think). Essentially, my theater did Shakespeare completely uncut, and before memorizing your lines you had to listen to cassette tapes where the founder of the theater took you through the full meaning of every single line. I think he recorded these with multiple sources open in front of him, and he’d already devoted decades of study to Shakespeare by the time I was born. And then school gave me a thorough education in literary analysis, and putting all that together, I claim I have a better understanding of Shakespeare than the vast majority of Shakespearean actors, and probably the majority of Shakespeare scholars as well. (I believe most professional Shakespearean actors have no fucking clue what they’re saying most of the time, and how in heck is the audience supposed to understand what’s going on if the actors don’t?)
My vocabulary in Shakespearean English is more limited than my native English vocabulary, but I’d still say I’m comfortably fluent in Early Modern English, perhaps even better than I am at French. My friends say that it’s really fun to read through Shakespeare plays with me because they actually know what’s going on. Shakespeare is really funny! In addition to being really beautiful and moving and incredibly fun to act.
Anyway, I’m sorry your school sucked and also that all schools suck. I wish I could give everyone the education in Shakespeare that was given to me. I have ideas on how to make that happen, but alas, doesn’t seem like a priority with the world the way it is.
Why are modern translations so narrow? What level of nuance would you like them to capture?
By narrow I mean they are aiming to provide language-language translation, but they could hypothetically done on a much more granular level. For instance, a translation that matches the very specific vernacular of some shared Dutch & Jamaican family with its own code words. And there’s no reason the semantics can’t be considerably changed. Maybe Hamlet could be adjusted to take place in whichever professional context a small community would be most likely to understand, and then presented as a post modern punk musical because that community really likes post modern punk musicals. Whatever works.
One could argue that “liberal translations could never improve on the source, and therefore we need to force everyone to only use the source.” I disagree.
In translations of poetry—something I have amateur experience with—you have a lot of decisions to make.
I’m sure there must be a far greater deal of similar discussion around Biblical translations. See the entire field of Hermeneutics, for instance.
That said, I’d note I’m personally interested in this for collective epistemic reasons. I think that the value of “an large cluster of people can better understand each other and thus do much better research and epistemic and moral thinking” is a bigger priority than doing this for artistic reasons, though perhaps it’s less interesting.
For instance, a translation that matches the very specific vernacular of some shared Dutch & Jamaican family with its own code words. And there’s no reason the semantics can’t be considerably changed. Maybe Hamlet could be adjusted to take place in whichever professional context a small community would be most likely to understand, and then presented as a post modern punk musical because that community really likes post modern punk musicals. Whatever works.
Yeah okay that is a far more radical definition of ‘translation’ than I was working with. I buy translating things into idiolects (like the Dutch + Jamaican family), but I’m still skeptical of the second half of that paragraph. The problem being, in order to translate Hamlet into a new context and format, you have to make decisions about what the point of Hamletis. There’s a vague sense in which The Lion King is a version of Hamlet, but you obviously take away very different things from the two experiences. You’d have to have a very clear goal in mind when constructing your professional-context postmodern punk musical Hamlet, and the choice of that goal would make a huge difference to the end product.
You’d have to have a very clear goal in mind when constructing your professional-context postmodern punk musical Hamlet, and the choice of that goal would make a huge difference to the end product.
Agreed. This is a radical definition.
As translation gets more and more expansive, it becomes more difficult to ensure consistency and quality. But it also leads to a lot of value generation, so can often be worth it.
Hamilton, the Musical, was arguably a retelling / “expansive translation” of the book, which itself was a summary of the original documents. I think most people who originally heard about the idea of Hamilton thought it could never work because of how weird (and expansive) it was. Not only was it presented for people who liked musicals, but it was sort of optimized to appeal specifically to communities of color. It doesn’t only translate the older dialects into modern English, but it converts it specifically to the vernacular and musical preferences of parts of Hip Hop culture.
I’m a big fan of that. I’m sure a lot of information was lost along the way, but the value proposition of this dramatic reinterpretation is clear to many viewers.
Now, not every potential translator may be as talented as Lin-Manuel Miranda now, but the potential is still clear, and in the future we’ll have AI to help us.
Interesting post! This comment is going to be more some random thoughts I had while reading than a proper response.
First, translations of Shakespeare is a super interesting arena. No Fear Shakespeare ‘translates’ the original plays into modern English, which I admit is a helpful idea, but there’s a problem with these beyond just the feeling of being juvenile: the ‘translations’ are often wrong, sometimes blatantly so. One such line I remember well is from Hamlet. The original is:
which became
The No Fear Shakespeare version has clearly translated this as if it were, “Horatio—or do I forget myself?” (all punctuation in Shakespeare is arbitrary, so the important thing here is “I do” vs “do I”). The NFS version makes absolutely no sense in the context of the play, because Horatio is Hamlet’s best friend! At the time of this meeting they haven’t seen each other in a few months, but the reason Horatio is in Denmark at all is to be a companion to Hamlet, because they’re BFFs. Hamlet definitely fucking knows his name. My interpretation of the original line is something like “Welcome Horatio, who I would as soon forget as my own self,” i.e. basically the exact opposite of what NFS said.
---
Why are modern translations so narrow? What level of nuance would you like them to capture? A lot of the beauty—and a lot of the meaning—in Shakespeare is in the specific use of language (rhythm, imagery, sound, antithesis, repetition, et cetera). Arguably you just can’t get every iota of the meaning out of Shakespeare without the exact original words. So it seems like it necessarily has to be a spectrum. (Incidentally this reminds me of the question of whole brain emulation: at what level of resolution does the emulation have sufficient fidelity to ‘be’ you, if you can’t replicate the entire brain quark for quark?)
In translations of poetry—something I have amateur experience with—you have a lot of decisions to make. Do you try to preserve both the meter and the rhyme scheme? That already severely restricts your choice of words, making it harder to get across the explicit meaning. And then what about alliteration, assonance, in-rhymes? What about double (or triple) meanings? (when these latter take a backseat the omitted meaning is often added as a footnote or annotation). What if there’s cultural information that doesn’t carry over well to your intended audience? And if you’ve taken all the foregoing considerations into account, what’s the likelihood that it’s even possible for you to end up with something that feels true to the original (in the sense that poetry evokes certain images and emotions)?
There’s a great scene in Henry IV Part 2 that’s almost entirely sexual puns*. If you had to write a Spanish version of this scene, would it be better to preserve the literal (primary) meaning of each line? Or should you write a new scene that has the same basic plot, but where you’re at liberty to change the literal meanings of the lines so you can fit in more sexual puns that actually make sense in Spanish? From what I’ve seen most translators choose the former (though perhaps this is specific to Shakespeare due to the crazy reverence in which people hold his works). I think this is a mistake artistically, but also there’s clearly a trade-off here. Without incredibly intensive labor, you can’t have it both ways.
I don’t know much about ML so perhaps it would be a lot easier for it to solve these problems than it is for a human. But given the current strategy of training on corpora, and the fact that I doubt there are more than a handful of good examples of how to balance all of these considerations, I’m not sure how an ML system would learn to do it. But again, I’m not a computers person.
---
Although I was talking about poetry, I think a lot of the same broad considerations apply to the idea of personalized translations (e.g. of Wikipedia). I can see an ML system learning my idiolect just by listening to me 24⁄7, but learning where my inferential distances are (for lack of better phrasing) seems quite a lot harder? Though… perhaps I am just underestimating GPT-N?
---
*The link doesn’t do it justice at all, but just for example look at the words ‘stab’, ‘enter’, ‘lusty’, and ‘fist’, and the delightful line ‘do me, do me, do me your offices’.
Agreed that translations are often wrong, but I don’t think this is reason to give up on them! Translations between languages often fail, but I’m thankful we have them.
The alternative to translation that I was taught in school about Shakespeare was to just give us the source and have us figure it out. I’m absolutely sure we did a terrible job at it, even worse than that bad translation. I don’t remember ever having a lesson on how to translate Early Modern English to Modern English. I think I barely understood how large the difference was, let alone interpreted it correctly.
My knowledge on this topic comes from the Great Courses course “The Story of Language” by John McWhorter. Lecture 7 is great and goes into detail on the topic.
Some quotes, transcribed here:
Since we’re basically just on a Shakespeare tangent now, and I really like talking about Shakespeare—I was lucky to have an extremely thorough education in Early Modern English starting from a very young age (starting around 7, I think). Essentially, my theater did Shakespeare completely uncut, and before memorizing your lines you had to listen to cassette tapes where the founder of the theater took you through the full meaning of every single line. I think he recorded these with multiple sources open in front of him, and he’d already devoted decades of study to Shakespeare by the time I was born. And then school gave me a thorough education in literary analysis, and putting all that together, I claim I have a better understanding of Shakespeare than the vast majority of Shakespearean actors, and probably the majority of Shakespeare scholars as well. (I believe most professional Shakespearean actors have no fucking clue what they’re saying most of the time, and how in heck is the audience supposed to understand what’s going on if the actors don’t?)
My vocabulary in Shakespearean English is more limited than my native English vocabulary, but I’d still say I’m comfortably fluent in Early Modern English, perhaps even better than I am at French. My friends say that it’s really fun to read through Shakespeare plays with me because they actually know what’s going on. Shakespeare is really funny! In addition to being really beautiful and moving and incredibly fun to act.
Anyway, I’m sorry your school sucked and also that all schools suck. I wish I could give everyone the education in Shakespeare that was given to me. I have ideas on how to make that happen, but alas, doesn’t seem like a priority with the world the way it is.
By narrow I mean they are aiming to provide language-language translation, but they could hypothetically done on a much more granular level. For instance, a translation that matches the very specific vernacular of some shared Dutch & Jamaican family with its own code words. And there’s no reason the semantics can’t be considerably changed. Maybe Hamlet could be adjusted to take place in whichever professional context a small community would be most likely to understand, and then presented as a post modern punk musical because that community really likes post modern punk musicals. Whatever works.
One could argue that “liberal translations could never improve on the source, and therefore we need to force everyone to only use the source.” I disagree.
Very true! There’s actually a lot of discussion of this around Harry Potter, which needed a lot of translations very quickly, and does have a fair bit of wordplay and the like. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation
I’m sure there must be a far greater deal of similar discussion around Biblical translations. See the entire field of Hermeneutics, for instance.
That said, I’d note I’m personally interested in this for collective epistemic reasons. I think that the value of “an large cluster of people can better understand each other and thus do much better research and epistemic and moral thinking” is a bigger priority than doing this for artistic reasons, though perhaps it’s less interesting.
Yeah okay that is a far more radical definition of ‘translation’ than I was working with. I buy translating things into idiolects (like the Dutch + Jamaican family), but I’m still skeptical of the second half of that paragraph. The problem being, in order to translate Hamlet into a new context and format, you have to make decisions about what the point of Hamlet is. There’s a vague sense in which The Lion King is a version of Hamlet, but you obviously take away very different things from the two experiences. You’d have to have a very clear goal in mind when constructing your professional-context postmodern punk musical Hamlet, and the choice of that goal would make a huge difference to the end product.
Agreed. This is a radical definition.
As translation gets more and more expansive, it becomes more difficult to ensure consistency and quality. But it also leads to a lot of value generation, so can often be worth it.
Hamilton, the Musical, was arguably a retelling / “expansive translation” of the book, which itself was a summary of the original documents. I think most people who originally heard about the idea of Hamilton thought it could never work because of how weird (and expansive) it was. Not only was it presented for people who liked musicals, but it was sort of optimized to appeal specifically to communities of color. It doesn’t only translate the older dialects into modern English, but it converts it specifically to the vernacular and musical preferences of parts of Hip Hop culture.
I’m a big fan of that. I’m sure a lot of information was lost along the way, but the value proposition of this dramatic reinterpretation is clear to many viewers.
Now, not every potential translator may be as talented as Lin-Manuel Miranda now, but the potential is still clear, and in the future we’ll have AI to help us.