the death of the translator in machine translation: a bilingual poetry project

The death of the translator in machine translationA bilingual poetry project

Tong King LeeThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This paper explores the notion of the death of the Translator, inspired by Barthes’ formulation of the death of the Author. It argues that the death of the Translator is caused by a loss of human agency in translation and is therefore most clearly exemplified in machine translation. Based on an avant-garde bilingual poetry project by a Taiwanese poet, the paper demonstrates that machine translation can produce unexpected new meanings through unpredictable routes of seman-tic and syntactic divergences from the source text. The poet’s use of transparency as physical medium and of machine translation as mediator raises the following questions: does translation actually allow us to ‘read through’ a source text? If so, to what extent is such translation ‘transparent’? How should we even come to terms with the concept of ‘transparency’ with respect to the meaning of a literary text in translation? The paper argues that in the bilingual project in question, machine translation plays the crucial function of bringing the reader’s attention back to the target language by way of delaying/blocking comprehension, hence rendering the corporeality of the target language ‘transparent’.

Keywords: Hsia Yü, death of the translator, machine translation, dissemination, différance

0. Introduction

In his famous proclamation of the death of the author, Roland Barthes debunked the long-standing myth in literary criticism that meaning,1 seen as some sacro-sanct entity, resides in the originator of an utterance. Preparing the epistemological grounds for post-structuralist thinking, Barthes proposed the displacement of the author as the source of meaning, positing instead that “it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality…to reach that

Target 23:1 (2011), 92–112. doi 10.1075/target.23.1.06leeissn 0924–1884 / e-issn 1569–9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

The death of the translator in machine translation 93

point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’ ” (Barthes 1977: 143). A crucial motif here is that of impersonality. Due to the inherently intertextual nature of all texts, the authority of the author2 as the origin from where meaning is derived dissipates within the interwoven threads from multiple sources (which themselves come from other, multiple sources). It is in this sense that writing is seen as imper-sonal or depersonalised, since its meaning cannot be attributed to a singular entity:

[L]inguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the per-son of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it (ibid.:145; emphasis in original).

If every utterance is nothing more than a fundamentally linguistic moment (as opposed to an author/speaker communicating to a reader/listener via the medium of language), subjectivity is, in theory, detachable from the act of writing itself. Barthes’ theory thus prompts a radical rethinking of the centrality of authorial subjectivity in the determination of literary meaning, and of the extent to which the author may exercise jurisdiction over the interpretive possibilities of a work. If one extends Barthes’ formulation on the dethronement of the Author beyond a single language/text into the discursive space of translation, can we similarly pronounce the death of the Translator, who is, of course, a kind of author in his/her own right? And if we are to make such a pronouncement, what theoretical implication might it have for our understanding of literary meaning? The idea of the translator’s demise seems to contradict more recent sociological studies of translation, wherein the ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ of the translator as an active player in the negotiation of meaning is foregrounded and indeed celebrated (see Wolf 2007 ad passim). Yet just as Barthes’ negation of the author’s subjectivity has led scholars to critique the subjectivity of the reader (e.g., P. Chen 2009: 181), it may be argued that if the author can be dispossessed of his/her agency in the production of mean-ing, as the many strands of post- theories in Translation Studies have attested, the subjectivity of the translator may similarly be called into question.

The death of the translator is most directly caused by a loss of human agency in translation, and is therefore most clearly exemplified in machine translation (not-withstanding the fact that humans are responsible for the intricate programming behind all machine translations). Often seen as a poor substitute for the human translator and used only for the most mechanical of tasks, machine translation can at times produce unexpected new meanings through unpredictable routes of

94 Tong King Lee

semantic and syntactic divergences from the source text. What do we make of such unintended ‘meanings’ produced by the unconscious machine? Since writing is essentially a kind of language performance, according to Barthes, translation, as a form of writing, too must be regarded as a discursive activity wherein “only language acts”. If Barthes’ elimination of authorial control over interpretation her-alds the death of the Author, an elimination of the translator’s subjectivity through machine translation signals the death of the Translator. This leads us to a consid-eration of how machine translation as language performance leads to the death of the Translator, as well as the implication of this for an understanding of meaning in translation.

The present paper is a case study of an English-Chinese bilingual poetry proj-ect in which machine translation is a central mechanism. The project in question is an avant-garde literary endeavor in bilingual poetry ‘writing’ which employs the Internet and a computer translation application. Being the first of its kind, at least in the Chinese world, the project is itself a literary experiment. Besides theorising the writing/translation process in the project, this paper further seeks to partici-pate in and extend the project’s play with the machine translator, with an eye on tracking the path of dissemination that ‘meaning’ undertakes. In the following, the paper first discusses the effects of machine translation on literary meaning in Hsia Yü’s bilingual enterprise, drawing on post-structuralist theories on writing/trans-lation. This is followed by an experimental play with Hsia’s engagement with the machine translator through the use of multiple translation programs. The paper concludes by addressing the theoretical significance of machine translation for a nuanced understanding of the meaning of ‘meaning’.

1. The machine translator in Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise

In 2007, the contemporary Taiwanese author Hsia Yü (b.1956) published a collec-tion of thirty-three bilingual poems by the name of Fenhongse zaoyin/Pink Noise, taking Chinese literary avant-gardism to a whole new height. As suggested by the title of the collection — ‘pink noise’ being a technical term used in audio engi-neering to denote a type of spectral density — the concept underlying the genesis of this work is noise, belletristic noise (wenzi zaoyin) to be exact. In an interview (Hsia 2008, see also Bradbury 2008), Hsia revealed that the inspiration for her collection came from noise and low-frequency acoustic art CDs, which prompted her to contemplate the possibility of applying noise aesthetics to the written word. The creative process started with the poet plucking random English phrases3 from resources in cyberspace, specifically, from “endless chain of blogs” and “the many websites that popped up” when hyperlinks in spam were clicked. These phrases


were then pieced together in such a way that they resemble the visual form of poetry (in the poet’s own words, to “to fit them together until they clicked like a music box”), and then fed into the translation application in Sherlock 4 to generate corresponding Chinese versions. Based on the co-text/context in the machine-generated translations — which can turn out to be quite different from that in the corresponding English poem as a result of collocational shifts — the poet then tweaked the ‘original’ English phrases and ran them through Sherlock again to pro-duce a new translation. The cycle was repeated a number of times for each set of poems. Finally, Hsia juxtaposed the intertwined English and Chinese texts to form parallel texts, creating what she called, in quotation marks, a volume of “translated poetry” (fanyi shi).5

The material form of Pink Noise embodies the innovative spirit of the poet. Hsia printed her poems not on paper but on transparency sheets. Each set of par-allel poems is printed in two colours: the English poems in black, and the Chinese (translated) poems in pink. The choice of colour is intentional: the machine trans-lations, which are stringently literal and thus highly unreadable, constitute verbal noise to the ear of the reader who has been inculcated with the doctrine of fluency. They are thus printed in pink to recall the technical jargon of ‘pink noise’, echoing the title of the book. The poems are also lineated in such a way that the English poems are left-justified, while their Chinese translations are right-justified. The visual impact of such a layout is stunningly postmodern. It reminds us of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996: 230–32) notion of ‘inscription’, which pertains to the multimodal effect afforded to a text by the material qualities of the medium (such as paper) used. For Pink Noise, when the reader collapses and holds together the transparency pages on which a set of parallel poems is printed, the English and Chinese lines superimpose on and partially overlap each other, so that it is possible to perform a parallel reading of each line in the two languages (and in two colours as well). In doing so, one is literally reading the Chinese translation ‘through’ the English text, as the transparency on which the translated poem is printed lies be-neath that on which the English poem is printed. It is this ‘transparency’ and ‘read-ing through’ that Pink Noise prompts us to think about. Does translation actually allow us to ‘read through’ a source text? If so, to what extent is such translation ‘transparent’? How should we even come to terms with the concept of ‘transpar-ency’ in respect to the meaning of a literary text in translation?

1.1 From the death of the Author to the death of the Translator

The process by which Pink Noise is conceived places the constructs of authorship and translatorship on the margins. Hsia Yü does not profess to be the author — as the term is conventionally understood — of the English poems in her collection.

96 Tong King Lee

As the strings of words that constitute the ‘original’ poems are randomly taken from the Internet, the origin of each work, if any at all, is varied, fragmented and heterogeneous. This patching together of disparate jigsaw-like phrases that even-tually do not quite form an organic unity (neither is such unity desired by the poet) is reminiscent of a similar technique used by Hsia in her third project Moca wuyi mingzhuang (Rub Ineffable). The latter work was basically created out of Hsia’s sec-ond poetry collection Fuyushu (Ventriloquy), specifically by dismantling (by way of physically cutting out) individual phrases from Fuyushu and permutating (by way of pasting) them to form ‘new’ poems. This pastiche technique was once again enacted in Pink Noise, except that the poet carried it further this time by taking bits and pieces of linguistic material from cyberspace. The following example is the first stanza of the first poem in the collection:

Brokenhearted time and ordinary daily moment

How fucking creepy is that?So different and sweetA promise awaits usAt the limits of the mystical glowIf we must dieWe will need those rhyming skillsSome people are born withOthers develop (Hsia 2008)

The fragmented nature of the source texts has immense implications for the (in)determinability of literary meaning in Pink Noise. Each line in the ‘original’ poems bears the trace of an unrecorded past source (which is by no means necessarily lit-erary in nature), and yet differs from its past usage through its recontextualisation in the poem. Thus, each line in an English poem may take on a certain sense in its source, wherever that is. When uprooted from its original site of occurrence, a phrase or clause can acquire a potentially new sense as it is re-planted into the po-em’s co-text, this co-text being made up of other phrases that are similarly derived from various digital sources in an almost casual manner. The ‘meaning’ of each line, then, cannot be determined or pinned down as if it were something discrete and concrete, encapsulated and locked within the English signifiers. Meaning is rather an emergent entity that is in perpetual flux, always arising as a consequence of an opposition to other (absent) concepts, as opposed to being a presence in and of itself (Davis 2001: 15).Yet there is no final interpretation as such. The text remains open even when seen as a whole, for the juxtaposition of various English lines to form a ‘poem’ is but an illusory act on the part of the poet to create the formal image of ‘poetry’, as it is conventionalised. In the hands of Hsia, strings of


words from different sources come together and cohabit, often uneasily, within the discursive space of the poem to form an intertextual site where meanings encoun-ter, clash and coalesce to form new senses.

Critics may suggest that indeterminacy of meaning is characteristic of all po-etry, and cannot thus be seen as a distinctive feature of Pink Noise. While this may be true, it should be noted that such indeterminacy is deliberately foregrounded by the poet in a very material way that is not often seen in other poetry collections. By originating the individual phrases in her English poems in an un-patterned man-ner from myriad digital sources, Hsia relinquishes her authorial subjectivity and consequently much of her control over meaning. She has enacted the death of her perceived role as author by adopting a literary mode that seeks to bring to the fore the intertextual network within which language is embedded and meaning dis-seminated. In so doing, Hsia produces what she has variously called ‘anti-poems’ (fanshi 反詩), ‘non-poems’ (feishi 非詩) and ‘pseudo-poems’ (weishi 偽詩), refus-ing to settle on a fixed name and reminding the reader that the word ‘poem’ must be interpreted within quotations (Hsia 2008).

Hsia did not stop here in her experiment with meaning. A critical stage in the creation of Pink Noise was the use of the translation application in Sherlock. The products of machine translation are invariably characterised by foreignised syntax and disjunctive collocations, which contribute to a high degree of rupture in lin-guistic flow. Meaning in translation proceeds and stops intermittently, baffling the Chinese reader to the extent that the reader has to consult the corresponding Eng-lish poem frequently to gain access to the Chinese translation.6 Of interest to us is the fact that a line in an English poem is often reincarnated into something quite different in its machine-translated version. To take an example, the following is the Chinese translation of the English stanza cited above, with the back-translation given by Google Translate:

Translation by Sherlock:

令人心碎的時代和普通每日時刻

怎樣性交是蠕動那？很不同和甜承諾等候我們在神秘愛的限額在明亮，發光，似神的煥發如果我們必須死我們將需要那些押韻的技能某些人是出生與其他人顯現出 (Hsia 2008)

98 Tong King Lee

Back-translation by Google Translate:

Heartbreaking moments of the times and the general daily

What sex is it creeping?Very different and sweetWe promised to wait forLimits of love in the mysteriousIn the bright light, like God’s glowIf we must dieWe will need those skills in rhymeSome people are born withOthers showing

The title of the English poem contains the phrase “heartbreaking time”, which is rendered as lingren xinsui de shidai, literally “heartbreaking times/milieu/era”. The machine translation thus changes the temporal perspective of the title from a more delimited and discrete frame, suggesting ‘the time when the event of heartbreaking takes place’, to a more macroscopic and abstract one, suggesting ‘a milieu where hearts are broken’. Interestingly, the back-translation by Google Translate reverts the Chinese word shidai (‘times’, ‘milieu’, ‘era’) back into its discrete meaning with the word “moments”, thus tying the English back-translation (and, by extension, the Chinese translation) back to the English original. The signifier, ‘time’, has thus looped back onto itself, with a diversion in-between via a double translation (first from English to Chinese, and then back from Chinese to English), illustrating the unpredictable trajectory of meaning that a signifier may undertake through ma-chine translation.

The first line of the English poem “How fucking creepy is that?” uses the expletive as an adverb, quite typical of low-register English vernacular, with no particular reference to the denotative meaning of the word — sex. A human translator with a minimal degree of familiarity with English would arguably have understood and rendered the emotional load of the word, as opposed to its de-notative sense. The machine translator, however, disregards such emotional mean-ing and goes straight for the literal sense: zenme xingjiao shi rudong “what sex is creeping?” (see back-translation). The adverb ‘fucking’ has thus been concretised into the Chinese verb xingjiao, which denotes sexual intercourse. The adjective ‘creepy’ in the English text undergoes a similar semantic mutation, its meaning being transformed from that of ‘scary’ to that of ‘moving slowly along the ground’ (rudong). If one tries to make sense of the barely grammatical Chinese sentence, it could mean something like ‘what kind of sexual intercourse is a creeping motion?’ The literal rendition performed by the machine translator has unexpectedly pro-truded the sexual element that is at most only latent in the English line, bringing


an interesting turn to the interpretive potential of the poem. Such concretisation of sexual innuendos through machine translation occurs in a number of poems in the collection (Yeh 2008: 174).

The above example shows that the machine translator has assumed a curious kind of unconscious autonomy of its own, enabling the original English poem to branch off in a way that a human translator, bounded by the ethics of translation, would not tolerate. By delegating the work of translation to a computer program, Hsia has relinquished yet another form of subjectivity — that of the translator, and she does so for a reason. To Hsia, the machine is the ideal candidate for the role of the translator by virtue of its “carefree mindlessness” and tendency to render a source text literally. A machine translator is superior to the human translator because it “makes no commitment”, and “like any lethal lover, it announces from the very beginning that it is not to be trusted” (Hsia 2008). This unconsciousness of the machine translator has been exploited by the poet to create a poetical aes-thetics that challenges conventional norms of literary production and reception. This aesthetics is best encapsulated in Hsia’s description of the linguistic nature of machine translation: “words keep coming but it doesn’t move forward. Nor does it take you anywhere; it persists in place even as it relentlessly crumbles, sentence by sentence it crumbles, when suddenly it arrives somewhere” (ibid.). This is the aesthetics of rupture, of ‘noise’, which can only be realised by the machine, for the human translator has a professional tendency, albeit to varying degrees, to some-how smooth out the meaning of the source text for target readers. The machine translator, in contrast, has such utter unconsciousness as to ignore the meaning, both denotative and connotative, loaded into the signifiers of the source text by convention and tradition.

It is this unconsciously ‘unethical’ stance on the part of the machine that un-derlies, or even motivates, Hsia’s attempt to deconstruct meaning by way of creat-ing lettristic noise. This very special type of ‘noise’ allows a translation to break away from the control of the source text, generate novel interpretations (“suddenly it [the word] arrives somewhere”) and gain its own meaning potential. This au-tonomy of meaning in translation is achieved at the expense of the loss of human agency; adapting Barthes’ (1977: 148) formulation, the birth of noise aesthetics must be at the cost of the death of the Translator.

1.2 Machine translation and Hsia Yü’s “physical desire for words”

The common metaphors used to conceptualise translation point to its communi-cative function, for example, the bridge metaphor and other metaphors relating to the ‘communication model’ (see St. André 2010 ad passim). What if one were to turn things around and posit translation as a non-communicative, or even mis-

100 Tong King Lee

communicative, act? To Walter Benjamin, the hallmark of bad translation is com-municability: “any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential.” (Ben-jamin 1923 / 2000: 15). Within the literary circle in Taiwan, Hsia has been known for her unorthodox, non-communicative modes of expression, the distinctive fea-tures of which include non-referentiality and anti-narrativity.7 Hsia’s disregard for the interpretability of meaning and the grammatical acceptability of her poems makes her a controversial figure. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Pink Noise, where the poet solicits the help of the machine translator to evolve a brand of po-etics that challenges the “shockproof faith” in the “communicability of meaning” (Greer 1991: 153).

Most of Hsia’s poetry collections, with the possible exception of her fourth work Salsa, display, and indeed flaunt, her usual disposition to create jarring lin-guistic effects. This disposition climaxes in Pink Noise, in which Hsia undertakes a more ambitious attempt to release ‘meaning’ from the constraints of its signifiers in a drastic way, in order to achieve “the absolute liberation of language, a liberation theology/language’s theological liberation” (Hsia 2008). Specifically, Hsia enacts her ideal mode of writing by recourse to the machine translator, which contributes to the discursive thrust of Pink Noise by exacerbating the non-communicability of meaning. Such non-communicability is first and foremost realised in the form of ungrammaticality and anti-narrativity. Consider the following poem, taken from the collection:

Things seem to get worse before they get better

When, from a long distant past, nothing subsistsAfter the people are dead, after the things are broken and scatteredShe poised herself on the balance beam gracefullyAnd he waited with his fingers poised over the keysWho’s ready to remind usAmid the ruins of all the restEverything vanishes around meAnd works are born as if out of the voidRipe, graphic fruit falls offMy hand has become an obedient instrument flying of [sic] a remote will

Translation by Sherlock:

事似乎得到壞在它們得到更好

當，從長式遙遠的過去，沒什麽維持生活在人是死的之後，在事是殘破和驅散之後她優美地保持了平衡自己在平衡木


他等待了與他的手指保持平衡在關鍵字誰準備好提醒我們在所有休息之中廢墟一切消失在我附近並且工作是出生好像在無效外面成熟，圖像果子掉下我的手成爲了遙控的服從的儀器飛行將

Back-translation by Google Translate:

Bad things seem to get better in their

When, from the distant past, long-form, no livingAfter the man is dead, the thing is broken and dispersed after theTo maintain a balance her own beautiful balance beamHe waited with his fingers to maintain a balance in the keywordWho is ready to remind usAmong the ruins in all the restEverything around me disappearedAnd work as if born outside the validMature fruit fall imagesMy hands become a remote control will be subject to the instrument flight

The back-translation departs considerably from the Chinese translation (the ‘orig-inal’ in this second translation), but it might give non-Chinese readers some sense of the syntactical disjuncture that obtains in the Chinese text. Some clauses man-age to cling onto the fringe of logicality in the translation, despite being cast in a heavily exotic, foreignised syntax. For instance, the two clauses in the second line, zai ren shi si de zhihou, zai shi shi canpo he qusan zhihou are awkward con-structions in Chinese, but if the copula shi (translated from “are” in the English original) is dropped, the Chinese clauses do generally correspond to their English counterparts, on the linguistic level, that is. Other clauses, however, mutate into unrecognisable chunks of words as if juxtaposed by chance. The fourth line, “And he waited with his fingers poised over the keys” becomes a nonsensical sentence that is impossible to decipher with the logic of Chinese grammar: ta dengdai le yu ta de shouzhi baochi pingheng zai guanjianzi. While the original English line is a hypotactic sentence that hinges on the preposition “with”, the machine transla-tor changes this preposition into the Chinese conjunction yu (‘and’). But as the two clauses cannot be easily interpreted as having any conjunctive relation with each other, the sentence becomes paratactic. If one forces an interpretation on the ungrammatical sentence, the translated line might read “He is waiting to keep a balance on the keyword together with his finger”. To the rational reader trying to imbue the sentence with a determinate meaning, this reading would be unsound,

102 Tong King Lee

not least because it suggests that the subject “he” is waiting do something together with his finger, as if his finger were a separate entity with its own subjectivity.

Such nonsensicality is aggravated by the fact that the machine translator (or ‘machine poet’, as Hsia calls it) has rendered “keys” as guanjianzi (“keywords”) in Chinese. The word ‘key(s)’ is polysemous in English; within the co-text of the English poem, it could refer to the keys of a piano, considering the conventional collocation ‘fingers poised over the keys’. (It is worth noting, however, that this meaning is not finalised in and of itself, but a consequence of différance, that is, it emerges through its intertextual relationship with other signifiers as well as con-texts. That is why it is not possible to pin down the meaning of ‘key’ with any confidence; any tentative meaning that we subscribe to the word is the result of our understanding of how the word is used and what it means in other contexts (cf. Davis 2001: 15).) If we tentatively set down ‘keys of a piano’ as the referent of the English word ‘keys’, the word undergoes yet another transformation through machine translation. The sense of ‘keywords’ in the Chinese text is a figurative extension of the literal meaning of ‘keys’. Machine translation has thus acciden-tally uncovered the metaphorical meaning underlying the word ‘keys’. The path taken by the word ‘keys’ in this example demonstrates what Derrida called the ‘retentive’ and ‘protentive’ characteristics of meaning (Derrida 1967/1974: 47). A signifier does not refer to something already present and fixated within itself, but “is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element” (Derrida 1972b/1982: 13). The word ‘keys’ derives its sense from other elements within its co-text as well as from previous uses of the word in other contexts (the retentive aspect). The same word also allows itself, through machine translation in this case, to be extended into its (future) incarnation as guanjianzi or ‘keyword’ in Chinese (the protentive aspect). But what sense does it make to speak of ‘poising his fingers over the keywords’, which is what the Chinese translation reads literally? Nonsensicality troubles the translation here again, bur-dening the reader with the task of interpretation, and it is exactly this ‘non-sense’/nonsense that the poet is trying to force readers to come to terms with. Machine translation, through its intractably literal translation — or, perhaps more aptly, trans-mutation — and sheer ignorance of grammaticality and idiomaticity, churns out unintentional imagery, such as that of human fingers poising over abstract ‘keywords’, whatever that is supposed to ‘mean’ (indeed, if it is intended to mean anything at all!). This generates an abrupt aesthetics that challenges the reader’s poetic sensibility and his/her sense of security as regards how meaning is coher-ently communicated through a linguistic medium.

Other ungrammatical clauses in the translated poem include zai suoyou xiuxi zhizhong feixu, corresponding to “Amid the ruins of all the rest” (Line 6)


and bingqie gongzuo shi chusheng haoxiang zai wuxiao waimian, corresponding to “And works are born as if out of the void” (Line 8). In the first of these lines, the word ‘rest’ (meaning ‘remainder’) in the English poem is translated into xiuxi (‘to take a rest/break’) by the machine, and the noun feixu (‘ruins’) takes the position of a verb in the Chinese context, rendering the translated phrase ungrammatical. It is up to the reader to fill in some verb (such as biancheng ‘to turn into’) in front of feixu in order to produce a valid verb-object structure. Literally, this unaccept-able Chinese line might read ‘to ruin amid taking (all the) rest’, where ‘rest’ refers to a state of inactivity or repose. (It must be emphasised though that this is one out of several possible readings.) The reading does not make sense according to our conventional way of looking at meaning, but it is also by virtue of this un-grammaticality that a new image is conjured up in the mind of the reader: how could ‘a state of rest’ become a context within which ‘ruins’ are located? How is this translated Chinese line, if at all interpretable, intertextually and interlingually related to the original English line? Here the exotic form of the poem evokes new interpretive possibilities.

In a similar vein, Line 8 in the English poem is ‘interpretable’, insofar as the sentence conforms to established rules of grammar, though this in no way suggests that its meaning is closed. The Chinese translation, in contrast, distorts the syntax and translates ‘void’ into wuxiao (‘invalid’, see back-translation). This grammatical distortion, coupled with the literal rendition of ‘void’, makes the translated sentence incomprehensible by conventional logic. Once again, if we force an interpretation onto the line notwithstanding its ungrammaticality, it is literally ‘as if work comes about outside the invalid’. Interestingly, the same Chinese line is turned by Google Translate into “And work as if born outside the valid” (see back-translation). If one juxtaposes the original English line, the machine-generated Chinese translation and the machine-generated English back-translation, an interpretive tension en-sues. What might this line actually ‘mean’, if it is intended to mean anything at all? Does it mean that ‘work comes out of nowhere’ (original English), that ‘work that has come about is valid [outside the invalid]’ (Chinese translation) or that ‘work that has come about is invalid [outside the valid]’ (English back-translation)? Or does this semantic plurality suggest that meaning is a fluid entity that follows a meandering course, especially as it threads through different languages?

Ungrammaticality, the trademark of machine translation, is often seen as a justification as to why machines cannot surpass human translators when it comes to translating complex discourses. In Pink Noise, however, this perceived flaw be-comes a discursive resource that the poet taps into to embody the materiality of language. The more ungrammatical and nonsensical a translated poem sounds, the greater the extent the reader is compelled to focus on the linguistic sign per se, rather than on the construct of ‘meaning’, which is a very slippery notion in

104 Tong King Lee

Pink Noise. This is not to say that ‘meaning’ is out of the whole picture; ‘meaning’, as it were, is still the motivation for the reader’s pursuit in his/her reading, but no longer assumes (or, more accurately still, assumed by readers to assume) a concrete form within the discourse of the poetry collection. Meaning is here comprised of traces, that is, the textual relation between a contingent sense that a word or phrase might possess in an English poem and its various senses as used in other (absent) contexts, as well as the relation between this contingent sense and its potential sense(s) in Chinese translation. If each English poem in Pink Noise is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 1977: 146), translation then is a site of flux where the multitude of strands from each poem are proliferated into exponentially more strands of meaning in the target language. Meaning, rather than being established by the word, is dis-seminated through the word as ‘traces of traces’ (Derrida 1972a/1981: 26).

Such traces are theoretically invisible and therefore indeterminable by the lay reader. In Pink Noise, however, Sherlock produces automatic translations that defy syntactical conventions to such an extent that the baffled reader cannot but succumb themselves to the mercy of the physical manoeuvres of the signifier it-self. This is the very intention of Hsia Yü: to problematise the reading process and hence draw the reader’s attention back to the Chinese script and to the way mean-ing is refracted rather than reflected across language barriers. The ungrammatical clauses in the translated poems make for difficult reading, which is exacerbated by the physical form of the book that renders the reading process extraordinarily tedious.8 Such difficulty protrudes the signifier as the single most important en-tity in Hsia’s creative work, outside of which there is literally nothing. In one of Hsia’s earlier poems (Hsia 1997), the poet writes of “a physical desire for words” (dui wenzi de rouyu zhi’ai 對文字的肉慾之愛), which can be taken as the poet’s declaration of her disposition in writing. The erotic overtones evoked by the word rouyu (literally ‘desire for the flesh’) here suggest the poet’s extreme affinity with the material form of the Chinese language, including its script and sound.9 Such affinity has motivated Hsia to expose the skin and flesh of the Chinese language by highlighting its visceral form while breaking down its conventionalised meaning. In this light, the production of ungrammatical discourse in Pink Noise can be seen as Hsia’s attempt to “test the malleability of the Chinese language in the hope of extending its horizons” (Hsia 2008), and this desired ungrammaticality can only come about with the death of the (human) translator and deployment of the ma-chine (translator):

This [machine] translator is so preoccupied with fidelity, so infinitely faithful, that it radically estranges everything. The original and translation are supposed to


complement each other and create a shared meaning, yet all those faithful, declara-tive fragments often take on a different shape when glued together. Note that every sentence in the source text has a clear structure and is thoroughly translatable, whereas in the adjacent translations, every word and phrase is a linguistic entity, with all the characteristics of language in its totality, each driven to engage in an equivalent exchange and winding up physically united but spiritually apart (or is it spiritually united and physically apart?), cleaving like a shadow yet drifting farther and farther apart, estranged beyond recognition but with every detail infinitely magnified (Hsia 2008; my emphasis).

The ungrammatical constructions produced by the machine create a cacophony of words that estrange readers, jolting them out of their comfort zone of reading and challenging their taken-for-granted beliefs about the stability and sensibility of meaning. The paradox of unity in form and disparity in sense embodied in trans-lation (“physically united and spiritually apart”) is Hsia’s desired outcome in her experimental use of the machine in literary writing. By establishing the products of machine translation as a mirror image of the English poems, Hsia is at once reveling in the logographicity of the Chinese language and mocking the human-discursive construct of meaning. To traditional critics such audacious attempts are nothing more than a casual game with language, a deliberate attempt to de-construct/destruct the Chinese language. From a theoretical perspective, however, Pink Noise is significant in its foregrounding of the textual qualities of language — including its dissemination of meaning through difference and deferral — in not just literary writing but bilingual literary writing. The corporeality of the target language comes into high relief through machine-rendered foreignisations, which in turn provoke a delay, or deferment, in comprehension, as the reader seeks to negotiate and reconcile the traces of differences between translation and original.

2. Proliferating différance through multiple machine translations

The preceding section illustrated how the machine translator can sometimes con-tort the semantics of a line of poetry, and that a double machine translation (a first translation followed by a back-translation) can bring the meaning either back to its ‘original’ sense or further down the path of deviation. This prompts us to con-template the possibility of having the machine disseminate meaning ‘at free will’. What if one were to participate, and indeed extend, Hsia Yü’s language experi-ment by proliferating ‘meaning’ several times over using the machine translator? This section looks at how meaning can take on different turns when put through several translation applications simultaneously. To achieve this, the method of pluralist reading (Yeh 2010) is used: the English poems in Pink Noise were fed

106 Tong King Lee

into three translation programs, namely, Google Translate, Systran and Reverso to generate three corresponding Chinese versions of each poem. The English poem, Sherlock’s Chinese version published in Pink Noise and the three other transla-tions were then juxtaposed and compared.

The results are expectedly haphazard. Many of the translated pieces are highly unreadable, with the usual traits of foreignised collocations and syntactical distor-tions. However, the translations should not be too quickly dismissed as a mass of linguistic junk, an outcome of unconscious ‘play’ by the machine. Some semantic turns undertaken by the machine translator are interesting, not because their un-conventional forms might offer some kind of linguistic entertainment, but because they have implications for how we conceive the relationship between meaning and machine. As an example, the title of Poem 29 “Those misty memories seem aw-fully good” has several virtual reincarnations. While Sherlock and Systran render “misty” into the concrete image of baowu 薄霧 or ‘light mist’ in Chinese, Google Translate ‘chooses’ (as if it had consciousness of its own) to translate the same word into the abstract mengmeng 濛濛, a duplicative bi-syllabic morpheme that describes a state of ‘cloudiness’. Reverso stands out from the rest by simply refusing to translate: the word ‘misty’ is left sticking out like a sore thumb in the translated Chinese title. The word ‘senses’ in the line “To make their senses come alive and feel good” is translated as the concrete-sounding daoli 道理 (‘principles’) by Sher-lock and Systran, but as ganguan 感官 (‘sensory organs’) and ganjue 感覺 (‘feel-ing’) by Google Translate and Reverso respectively. Each machine seems to provide its unique interpretation of the two keywords, and the different translations high-light/downplay different potential facets of the words — for instance, the concrete and abstract dimensions of the signified concept — that come together to form a more holistic picture.

The intriguing thing about multiple machine translations is that each ma-chine unpacks a word in unpredictably different ways. Each translation is neither right nor wrong in itself, and enters into combination with other words in the poem to create new collocations and therefore new senses. For instance, the title of Poem 9 “In their near-human pleasure” is literally translated by both Sherlock and Systran as zai tamen jinren de lequ 在他們近人的樂趣. Google Translate, how-ever, renders it as zai tamen jiejin renlei de lequ 在他們接近人類的快樂, which expands the abstract notion “near-human” into the sense of a physical proximity to “human beings” (jiejin renlei). Reverso takes an unexpected path: zai fujin de ren gaoxing de 在附近的人高兴地, which is a fragment that means “the people in the vicinity are happy to…” The original English line, which itself has no determinable meaning, of course, splits itself into several potential readings in another language through the machine translator. Here Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the link between signifier and signified comes into high relief, as meaning is left to


the unconscious operations of the machine, governed by the invisible hands of a computer program.

Poem 18 is interesting as it dwells on one of Hsia’s perennial themes: sex. The line “He and I made it our duty to screw as often as possible”, direct and colloquial in English, takes a twist in machine translation. Sherlock renders ‘to screw’ literally as ningjin 擰緊 (‘tighten’): women de yiwu ningjin yue jingchang yue hao我們的義務擰緊越經常越好. The sense of ‘tightness’ here, which is also seen in the version by Systran, is drawn from carpentry and unexpectedly conjures up the physicality of sexual intercourse if read against the English line. Google Translate and Reverso, on the other hand, turn the verb ‘screw’ into a noun: luogan 螺桿 and luosi 螺絲 (both words referring to the object ‘screw’), thus dismantling the semantics of the English line and carrying the poem into another, non-sexual trajectory.

It is no surprise that not all the translated poems are readable. Readability, however, is really besides the point here. Neither is this excursion with multi-ple machine translation merely play, though ‘play’ is indeed part of the way in which meaning operates, evoking “the sense of that which, by the spacing be-tween the pieces of an apparatus, allows for movement and articulation” (Derrida 1987/1992: 64). This “spacing for movement and articulation” is provided for by the arbitrariness of the machine. The results of this pluralist reading in machine translation show that signifiers can potentially assume a multitude of new senses via the machine. At times, this allows the translation to supplement the source text, while at other times the translation projects itself into a totally divergent semantic path. Machine translation thus provides a prime site in demonstrating the contin-gency and non-singularity of meaning and its slippery relation with signifiers. It also has ramifications for how we conceptualise literary meaning in translation. To what extent does translation communicate meaning? Is miscommunication then also a form of communication that is inherent in translation, just as misreading is part of the process of reading/writing by which authors enact an anxiety of influ-ence (Bloom 1975: 3–6, 1997: 5–45)? If misreading is a strategy whereby a writer innovates under the influence of previous works, can miscommunication, as in-herent in machine translation, also be construed as a discursive means by which a translation simultaneously derives itself and breaks away from a source text?

3. Conclusion: Machine translation and its manoeuvres in meaning

Writing, as Barthes reminds us, is constituted by a multitude of traces, where mean-ing subsists as a volatile substance in constant movement with linguistic signifiers. Here the temporal continuity of meaning is broken, as the spatiality of writing is foregrounded, leading to an “evaporation” and “systematic exemption” of meaning:

108 Tong King Lee

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deci-phered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evapo-rate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning (Barthes 1977: 147).

Potentially, translation brings the multiplicity inherent in writing to exponential levels by extending the “space of writing” into another linguistic system. Meaning, then, is “ceaselessly posited and evaporated” for yet another series of cycles in an-other set of linguistic signifiers.

This proliferation of meaning is all the more exacerbated by literalism — what Walter Benjamin calls ‘transparent’ translation: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” (Benjamin 1923/2000: 21).10 Literalism, by virtue of its ostensible ‘transpar-ency’, exposes the original text to misreading. In an uncanny way, Hsia Yü’s ex-periment with the machine translator reifies this notion of transparency through her use of transparency film as medium and of a computer program as linguistic mediator. While the material space within which Pink Noise is embedded brings readers’ attention back to the written word, machine translation participates in this by foregrounding the corporeality — the ‘ishness’ — of Chinese.

To Hsia, it is the machine’s tendency to be non-fluent that allows her to stretch the limits of the Chinese language. She is therefore of the opinion that “[i]t’s im-portant that someone do this [referring to the use of machine translation in liter-ary writing] now because this technology is only going to get better with each ver-sion. One day the translations are going to be so fluent, these cybernetic Sherlocks will turn into mediocre poets” (Bradbury 2008: 38). The result is a foreignising (and, to some critics, disconcerting) breed of interlanguage, a misshapen, hybri-dised cross-fertilisation of English and Chinese that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s ‘pure language’. Through the arbitrary and contingent manoeuvres in meaning of the machine translator, a new poetical sensibility emerges in Pink Noise, where rupture in sense and syntax is replete throughout. A determinate meaning con-tinually eludes the reader, as ‘meaning’ arrives only at some tentative point, to be disseminated in-between discordant translated lines, ‘ranging over the space of writing’. This article further experimented with multiple machine translations, demonstrating the potential of meaning to be permutated across linguistic borders in manifold erratic moves.

Hsia’s apparent fetishism with the materiality of writing reveals more than just an avant-garde endeavour. The concept of transparency created through Pink Noise is theoretically profound. To Venuti (2008), ‘transparency’ points to the naturalisation of a source text through the use of fluent prose in the target


language. A fluent translation, accordingly, gives target text readers the illusion of having access to a source text directly. Under this regime of fluency, the inter-vening medium of translation is misleadingly perceived to be as transparent as a glass. Despite Venuti’s call for translators to adopt a foreignising strategy, fluency persists as a dominant criterion with which translators and critics judge the quality of translated work. The acclaimed Spanish-English translator Edith Grossman, for instance, asserts that

[r]epeating the work in any other way — for example, by succumbing to the liter-alist fallacy and attempting to duplicate the text in another language, following a pattern of word-for-word transcription — would lead not to a translation but to a grotesque variation on Borges’s Pierre Menard, who rewrites his own Don Quix-ote that coincides word for word with Cervante’s original, though it is considered superior to the original because of its modernity. Furthermore, a mindless, literal-ist translation would constitute a serious breach of contract. There isn’t a self-re-specting publisher in the world who would not reject a manuscript framed in this way. It is not acceptable, readable, or faithful, as the letters of agreement demand, though it certainly may have its own perverse originality. (Grossman 2010: 10–11)

It is exactly through “a mindless, literalist translation” that is “not acceptable, read-able, or faithful” that Hsia Yü explores the notion of ‘transparency’ with her “own perverse originality”. The use of transparencies deliberately creates the material space in which the English poems can be ‘read through’ the machine translations. Yet the literal machine translations remain defiantly unreadable and hence opaque in terms of their meaning; they are as semantically ‘non-transparent’ as they are materially ‘transparent’.

If we juxtapose Hsia’s concept of transparency with Venuti’s, we see a differ-ence in focus: for Venuti, transparency is a constructed textual quality that gives readers the false impression that they can see the meaning of a source text clearly through the intervening medium of translation. For Hsia, the concept of transpar-ency does not pertain to the source text, but to the target language. The machine translations do not allow the reader to see through the source text, but rather bring the reader’s attention back to the target language by way of delaying or even block-ing comprehension. The corporeality of the target language thus becomes ‘trans-parent’ through literal translation. It is the physical transparency of the book that paradoxically becomes an illusion, since the meaning of the translated texts is for the most part rather opaque.

Grossman’s comments quoted above testify to the necessity of using the ma-chine as mediator in Hsia’s project. Compared with the unconscious machine, human translators are, to varying degrees, subject to the governance of the flu-ency dictum and the constraints of translational ethics. One of the implications of

110 Tong King Lee

Hsia’s bilingual project is that it alerts us, in a very extreme way, to how translating for sense may suppress latent senses underlying the signifier. Literalism, arguably less practically useful as a translation strategy than semantic and communicative translation, thus has potential value in unlocking some of these ‘deferred’ mean-ings by ‘differing’ them with more conventional senses. And extreme literalism of the type demonstrated in Pink Noise has to come from the machine, which heralds the death of the (human) translator. Pink Noise thus throws a very different light on the machine translator, which in this case is not just an inferior substitute for the human translator. It is the “mindless, literalist translation” produced by the machine that allows meaning to be disseminated across language borders in the poetry collection, illustrating how the machine can contribute to the proliferation of literary meaning. Lastly, Hsia’s project also brings our attention to the impor-tance of the mode of inscription, and this and the use of the machine as translating medium, “raise questions about the politics of transcription, translation and read-ing” (Huang 2010: 48) in contemporary Chinese poetics.

Notes

1. The word ‘meaning’ used here and throughout the rest of the paper does not suggest that the ‘meaning’ of the word ‘meaning’ is unproblematic. As the primary objective of the following discussion is to illustrate the deconstruction/destruction of literary ‘meaning’ in translation, all instances of the word should be interpreted within quotation marks. Other keywords that should be read likewise are ‘original’, ‘source’ and ‘target’.

2. Here the etymological link between ‘author’ and ‘authority’ is telling of the symbolic power accorded to the former.

3. All the parallel poems in the collection are in English/Chinese except for one in French/Chinese. For convenience, the source texts are generally referred to in this article as “English poems”.

4. Sherlock was a web tool created by Apple Inc. for the Mac OS that included a translation ap-plication (or channel). The software was officially retired in 2007.

5. My quotations of Hsia’s own words are partly taken from an interview entitled Poetry inter-rogation: the primal scene of a linguistic murder appended to the end of the book, as translated by Zona Yi-ping Tsou. As Pink Noise was printed without pagination, quotations from the book are herein cited without page numbers.

6. This is not to say, of course, that the ‘original’ English poems have any determinate mean-ing. However, the English poems, by virtue of being nominal ‘source’ texts and being generally readable in English, do constitute some kind of reference point for the reader of the translated poems.


7. Some scholars have thus associated Hsia with the Language Poets, a post-modernist poetry tradition in contemporary Anglo-American literature (see, for example, C.Chen 2009). Not-withstanding the fact that Hsia does not share the radical oppositional politics that is at the heart of the agenda of the Language Poets (Shetley 1993: 138), Hsia’s oeuvre does exhibit post-mod-ernist/post-structuralist tendencies, even though the poet may or may not have been thoroughly conscious of or concerned with the theories behind what she is doing.

8. Here I borrow Yeh’s (2008: 177) apt description that “[t]he process [of reading Pink Noise] is constantly interrupted (the reader has to turn to the preceding page to check the English original in order to understand the Chinese translation), prolonged (the reader has to pause to re-read the radically defamiliarized Chinese), delayed (the reader has to insert a sheet of plain paper between pages so as to be able to read the words on the page), and distracted (the reader’s face is reflected on the opposite page when s/he reads a poem and the reader catches the reflection within peripheral vision)” (my emphasis).

9. In an interview, the writer expressed her obsession with the materiality of the Chinese lan-guage: “I’ve always loved those sentences that are rendered with a clumsy fidelity, those adorable literal versions that are virtually indifferent to Chinese grammar … and all those second- and third-hand translations from Russian via English and Japanese and who knows what else. Chi-nese writing began as ideograms depicting the traces and tracks of birds and animals, the sound of wind, ripples on water. Even today, when I encounter a sentence pieced together or assembled in some quirky fashion … my vision is awash with an intuitive pleasure in the ideographic na-ture of the Chinese writing system, its eccentric liberties, keen as animal instincts, evolving over time as if they knew no limits” (Hsia 2008).

10. Here, of course, Benjamin and Barthes diverge with respect to the notion of origin. In Ben-jamin’s scheme, the original text is something of a lofty and reified nature, which literal transla-tion should strive to “shine upon all the more fully”. Barthes, in contrast, repeatedly deconstructs the integrity of the original text and conceptualises it as a neutral construct.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, music, text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press.Benjamin, Walter. 1923/2000. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. In Baudelaire: Tableaux Parisiens.

Heidelberg: Richard Weissberg Verlag. Trans. Harry Zohn as “The task of the translator.” In Lawrence Venuti (ed), The Translation Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. 15–25.

Bloom, Harold. 1975. A map of misreading. New York: Oxford University Press.Bloom, Harold. 1997. The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry. New York: Oxford University

Press.Bradbury, Steve. 2008. “Hsia Yu” (an interview). Zoland Poetry 2. 34–46.Chen, Chun-jung. 2009. “Hsia Yu’s postmodern language poetry”. Chung Wai Literary Quar-

terly. 38:2. 197–227.Chen, Pei-yun. 2009. “Translation, interpretation and will-to-power”. Chung Wai Literary Quar-

terly. 38:2. 169–195.Davis, Kathleen. 2001. Deconstruction and translation. Manchester: St. Jerome.

112 Tong King Lee

Derrida, Jacques. 1967/1974. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1972a/1981. Positions. Paris: Minuit. Trans. Alan Bass as Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1972b/1982. Marges de la Philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Trans. Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987/1992. “L’aphorisme à contretemps”, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Galilée; trans. Niclas Royle as “Aphorism countertime”. In Derek Attridge (ed), Jacques Der-rida: acts of literature. New York & London: Routledge, 416–33.

Greer, Michael. 1991. “Language poetry in America: 1971–1991”. Meanjin 50.1. 149–56.Grossman, Edith. 2010. Why translation matters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.Hsia, Yü. 1997. Fuyushu [Ventriloquy]. Taipei: xianzaishi jikanshe.Hsia, Yü. 2008. Fenhongse zaoyin /Pink Noise (Second edition). Taipei: Self-published.Huang, Yunte. 2010. “ ‘Take it with a grain of MSG’: reading translated literatures from other

shores”. In Carol Maier and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds.), Literature in translation: teaching issues and reading practices. Ohio: The Kent University Press. 43–52.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading images. The grammar of visual design. London & New York: Routledge.

Shetley, Vernon. 1993. After the death of poetry: poet and audience in contemporary America. Durham: Durke University Press.

St. André, James (ed.). 2010. Thinking through translation with metaphors. Manchester: St. Je-rome.

Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The translator’s invisibility: a history of translation (Second Edition). New York & London: Routledge.

Wolf, Michaela. 2007. “Introduction. The emergence of a sociology of translation”. Michaela Wolf & Alexandra Fukari, eds. Constructing a sociology of translation. Amsterdam & Phila-delphia: John Benjamins. 1–36.

Yeh, Michelle. 2008. “Towards a poetic of noise: from Hu Shi to Hsia Yü”. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 30. 167–78.

Yeh, Michelle. 2010. “Literature in identity formation: reading Chinese literature in translation.” In Carol Maier and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds.), Literature in translation: teaching issues and reading practices. Ohio: The Kent University Press. 117–135.

Author’s address

Tong King LeeDepartment of Chinese and Bilingual StudiesThe Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHung Hom, KOWLOON, Hong Kong

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

the death of the translator in machine translation: a bilingual poetry project

Documents

tong king lee

oxford university press

kent university press

multiple machine translations

readers attention back

original english line

multiple sources

sexual intercourse