The ambiguities regarding the place of meaning in translation are not, however, new to machine algorithms. Others, however, might consider this a dangerous abdication of the task of the translator-a denial of interest as an obstruction to both meaning and the critical capacity to weigh and assess it: a kind of betrayal, a traitorous subordination of meaning to algorithms of cybernetic control and statistical number crunching. Meaning will be reclaimed as a statistically probable end-result while the means of getting there-the act of translating-will be divorced from questions of significance, thus, in a sense, guaranteeing the “objective” neutrality-viz., authority-of translation. Some might claim that fidelity will be secured as the data sets from which Google’s AI learns are grown. However, one would hardly credit, at least for the present, Google’s algorithm with the divinely inspired insight of the Septuagint. You do not need to worry about all that intermediate stuff of this is what it really means” (Post, 2013). As Robert Mercer, one of the pioneers of speech recognition and machine translation at IBM, put it: “ meaning means, or at least I personally think, the French that’s written there is the meaning of the English that’s written in the other place. ![]() For the computer, meaning is irrelevant to the act of translation rather, translation is governed by statistical algorithms based on probable location i.e., the likelihood of a correspondence between where a word in a cluster of words in one language stands in relation to a word in a cluster of words in another. Machine translation is founded in this desire. However, what happens when meaning is taken out of this equation? Can we inhabit the method of the Septuagint again to discover again an “objective” measure of translation untainted by human interest and immune to the vagaries of cultural border crossings and linguistic frontiers? Questions as to the stability of meaning across languages, cultures, classes, geographies, generations and genders stymie simplistic notions of pure, and direct translation untainted by either the translator or her transference of meaning from one medium to another. ![]() This relation however is often fraught and unstable, with translation’s legitimacy oscillating between the apocryphal verisimilitude of the Septuagint and the suspicion that the translator’s translation might traduce, as well as “translate”. Meaning governs the sway between the two sides of this balance, adjudicating reliability, accuracy and truth. A true translation is said to be faithful, a false one, an untrustworthy lie. Fidelity is the fulcrum upon which translation is poised between loyalty and betrayal.
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