![]() When I tried again, it recognised ‘cob’ but interpreted it as sweetcorn, which is definitely not what I wanted. It then perfectly happily translated this into French. The text on the screen appeared as “let’s do a camel down the galleon I need to come”. To experiment, I opened the translate app on my iPhone and said, “let’s do a gambole down the gulley, then eat a cob”. You may groan at the pun, but it perfectly illustrates the art of translation and the cultural differences that make it near-impossible to give accurate interpretations of speech in real time.Ī more modern example can be found in any smartphone, if you have an accent or dialect that differs from the Queen. She changed the angry grocer’s dialogue to “OH! SO THIS MELON’S BAD IS IT?”, while the very snooty customer replies with a phrase beloved of the British upper classes, “rather, old fruit!”. ![]() What was Anthea Bell to do? She couldn’t change the artwork, so she needed to find an alternative pun. ![]() In the drawing, a grocer character is holding half a melon and arguing with a bowler-hatted Brit, while the dialogue makes use of the ‘ chapeaux melon’ pun. It was a poke at British culture, but not directly translatable because we Brits don’t compare bowler hats to melons. But when the book Asterix in Britain was published in 1965, a ‘ chapeaux melon’, meant a bowler hat, as worn by the typical British gentleman. Indeed, it forms part of the writing.įor example, in French, the word melon means the same as in English, the fruit. Along with Derek Hockridge, her work translating the much-loved Asterix comics is as important to English readers as the art and writing of Goscinny and Uderzo. Let’s take the work of one of Britain’s most famous translators, Anthea Bell, as an example. Communication can be as individual as humans are, which is why the best translation is done by brain power. Context, culture, history, even tone of voice are as important as the words themselves, and that’s not something computers are very good at handling. It’s that words are not the entirety of communication. One of the biggest difficulties in translation is not, as you might expect, getting the software to understand your words (speech-to-text artificial intelligence is getting more accurate by the day, although I have noticed that my Brummie accent causes errors in transcription software that my Home Counties interviewees’ accents don’t trigger). But so far, some of the obstacles in creating a universal translator have been too big to scale. Technology has tried really, really hard to make the Babel fish a reality, albeit by less fishy and psychically intrusive means. ![]() It stuck around until 2012 when it was replaced by Microsoft Bing’s translation service, but the Babel fish has lingered firmly in popular culture as shorthand for ‘the ultimate translation solution’. Less than two decades later, AltaVista launched an online translation tool called babelfish, which was eventually purchased by Yahoo. It’s as good an idea as any, given the difficulty of real-time instant translation, and one which the translation and technology industry has been enthralled with since Adams’ novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was published in 1979.
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