Amodern 8 · March 2018
Recreating Early Work in Machine Translation
Small is oiled. It makes it. It keeps it big, oiled, black, black, black, black, heated and little. His headlight under his engine is proud of the water. Its engine is Engineer Small and Engineer Small. It keeps it little. When Engineer Small is proud of it, a little, heated, oiled, big, shiny engine under his steam keeps it big. When he is it, its shiny engine is shiny and... Read more...
Machine Translation and the Poetics of Automation
Six years after the groundbreaking appearance of The Mathematical Theory of Communication, elaborated by Claude Shannon and with an explanatory essay by Warren Weaver, another Weaver piece appeared in Machine Translation of Languages (1955). This collection of essays extended the theories of linguistic mechanization that Shannon’s work implied. As an electrical engineer trained in formal logic, Shannon’s engineering papers on the manipulation of electrical signals as substitutes for logical processes... Read more...
From al-Kindi to Weaver
What does it mean for a machine to make an utterance? Friedrich Kittler famously probed this question with reference to, among other things, Kruesi’s talking machine, the design of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, and the Colossus and Enigma machines.1 More recently, in the years immediately following the Snowden disclosures (2013-), the use of encryption technology has increased to a point where more of our digital communications are encrypted than not.2... Read more...
An Interview with Otso Huopaniemi
love.abz at the Glicker-Milstein Theater, Barnard College, New York (April 16, 2015) “Welcome, good crowd. This is LOVE.ABZ.” Such begins one iteration of Otso Huopaniemi’s theatrical work, a speech synthesizer addressing the crowd – sometimes “dear audience” – at the outset of a multi-act translational exercise for human and machine performers. Some aspects of the staging provide a legible frame: the central projection screen displaying the familiar interface of Google... Read more...
Transcription and/as Translation Optophones convert type into patterns of audible tones. Initially designed in the United Kingdom in the 1910s to give blind readers direct access to inkprint materials such as books, new versions continued to be produced in the U.K., Germany, and United States through the 1970s, chiefly in the context of post-World War II rehabilitation. Reading with an optophone requires learning a tonal code: correlating sonic motifs to... Read more...
Let’s agree to call the operative aggregation of material culture and technology technics. Language making and, in particular, aesthetic language making, across all natural languages, is always and of necessity implicated, historically and specifically, with applicable technics, obvious examples being the material culture of the book and technologies of print. Technics are co-constitutive of linguistic artifacts and are compositionally significant for language makers. In all of what follows, readers should... Read more...
Archive-Based Image Description as an Intermedial Translation Technique
I admit to a longstanding preoccupation with image description, the primary focus of my theoretical and artistic research, and a peripheral knowledge of the science of interlingual translation. Nevertheless, the connections between description and translation can be explored within the specific context of intermedial translation techniques and from the vantage point of image description. The description of the visual content of a single photographic image, with its foundations in archival... Read more...
Transpilers and the New Temporalities of Programming in JavaScript
This essay is about transpilation and the future of translation work done by machines. “Transpilation” is a particularly ugly portmanteau word that refers, in web development, to a particularly confusing new concept used in building online JavaScript application. Mashing together “translation” with “compilation,” it refers to the process of translating one human-readable computer programming language into another. While compilation without translation refers to the conversion of human-readable programming languages into... Read more...
Spirit-Channeling in Edward FitzGerald’sRubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Arguably, there have been three major media transitions that altered how the written word was produced and consumed in the West. Historians of the book have demonstrated that transitions from scroll to codex, codex to print, and print to “networked and programmable media,” have each in their own way transformed writing and reading.1 With these transitions there also came new aesthetic practices. Print technology, for instance, had a fundamental impact on... Read more...
I. What exactly does Friedrich Kittler mean when he writes: “a medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated”?1 Is it merely a restatement of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” separating out the translatability of media content from the translation of a medium and its own properties? Surely it does not mean our media machines are incapable of performing translation – though proponents and detractors of machine... Read more...
Finding the Human in the Margins of Machine Translation
In the early 1990s, a hot debate reigned over machine translation (MT) research, divided quite sharply and dramatically along methodological and philosophical lines. On one side were the so-called rationalists, who applied rule-based approaches derived from linguistic theories to computer translation. On the other were the so-called empiricists, a new group identified with the brute processing approach pioneered at IBM Yorktown Heights, which involved the statistical modeling of large datasets... Read more...