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The Plants of Shakespeare

This is the title of the first chapter of Umberto Eco’s Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (L.: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003). The plants (or factories) in question are, in fact, the works. At the beginning of that chapter Eco briefly studied the potential of a computer program to recognise synonyms in different languages and to translate them accordingly. So, he used Babelfish, the automatic translating tool provided by AltaVista, to translate the works of Shakespeare into Italian and back into English. The works became gli impianti to then become the plants. Interestingly, it’s not altogether wrong, because work, according to Webster’s, can be an activity, a literary work, a duty and also a place of industrial labour. So, the problem is not in that Babelfish has got too many synonyms to juggle, but rather that it doesn’t know that Shakespeare was a poet, and not a capitalist factory owner.

Now, I recently came across a text in Portuguese that I needed to translate. I don’t actually know Portuguese (except for when the words are distinctly Romanic or otherwise familiar), so I turned to Google Translate. The text was about music, and the English translation generally made sense, except for when Google translated a Portuguese baixista (bassist) as stock exchange operator. I tried to translate the Portuguese word on its own, but the result was the same. I think this should make us forever abandon any hope to achieve a total equivalence in translation, when using an automatic tool.

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