machine translation

“I’m on the hard drive. When the gift came. Both disk and memory disappear”. Kulaktan kulağa, Chinese whispers, or Arabic telephone reveals mis(machine)translated stories of found images through tangible interaction. The installation uses what is (at first glance) just a box of old photographs to examine the western-centric lens of the internet by humanising machine translation errors. The artist collected old photographs from London’s flea markets, and wrote short stories for each photograph in her non-native English. Using an online machine translation tool, she machine-translated the stories into her native Turkish, and into other ‘foreign-looking’ languages such as Chinese and Arabic. The garbled outcome then is machine-translated back to English, carrying its inaccurate interpretation alongside. The stories and photographs are integrated into an interactive installation that invites readers to reveal mistranslated stories through tangible interaction. The installation invites spectators to pick a photograph from an old box and explore its interpretation. The interpretation becomes garbled along the way, until it significantly deviates from the initial meaning due to the inaccurate machine translations of non-Indo-European languages. By acting as a mediator of the interpretation, the reader is invited to reflect on the displayed errors, and the reader’s own position within its commonality. The name of the artwork is an analogy to question socially accepted neologisms for what is foreign-looking or foreign-sounding to us. The title refers to the name of a children’s game in Turkish, Kulaktan Kulağa, in which a message is passed through a line of players through whisper. The name translates from Turkish as ‘From Ear to Ear’, literally describing the act of whispering and emphasising the act as the centre of the game. The title of the work is completed by two Western naming for the same children’s game, which emphasise the foreign-sounding of the garbled messages as the core of the game.

In this performance, an intersemiotic translation occurs between the visual artist’s demoscene videos and the performer’s live text generation. The performance continues the tradition of looking at electronic literature as something that is also created in front of a live, physically present audience. It challenges the notion of digitally native writing in that, as long as the writing is being performed by a human and not by a machine, there is always an organic, bodily dimension to everything natively digital. How can human writing then be born digital, if we are to take the term literally? In this sense, the performance re-situates the human performer. In another version of the performance, shown earlier in 2017, a robot writes in parallel and on stage with the human performer. In Porto, though, we'll leave the robot at home or have it only telepresent to bring attention to the contrast of human and machine embodiment in electronic writing. The human does not embody a privileged author in any unproblematic way, as we know from poststructuralist theory and more recently from the deconstruction of the author performed by digital media, and yet the human writer-performer continues to act as a source or node that contributes to the textual transformations that happen in and through digital media. In addition to language and video, here the two main media are machine translation and speech recognition software. The performance does not invite its audience to participate, but it is as open and transparent in its structure and implementation as possible.

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

A codework piece readable by humans in an HTML editor. On Sondheim's UbuWeb: Contemporary page, here's the paratext: "INSTRUCTIONS: Cut and paste into your own html editor, convert into html document, and view in browser."

As Sondheim states, it is text before and after the "wonder" of resurfacing: "(...) some of the letters are represented by their codes; in the second, the upper ascii codes are inserted between the mayas, illusions. So the translations work with codes into codes, implying codes all the way up and down …

There's also of course the wonder—James Ellroy and Merleau-Ponty both talk about wonder—which comes with the text emerging as readable. Of course it was text before and after as well …

In my dialup program, there are also colors in the second piece—"maya-prayer-extension" standing out—the chanting of the syllables of god, speaking the unspeakable …"

(Source: http://home.jps.net/~nada/sondheim.htm)

Mary Flanagan, State University of New York, Buffalo (USA)"[raveling]"

[raveling] is a poetry performance piece for machines and human about memory and communication which posits verbal communication and text as iterative rituals that can mutate and change over time, distance, and repetition.

Prior to the piece I produced a poem with my computer. This performance was a stream-of-consciousness spoken word event and was translated by the machine. My computer synthesized the words it recognized and I saved these words into a rough poem.

In performance I read this synthesized computer/human poem to the public and to computer #1. This first computer/performer will listen to the poem and after listening, read back the composition as it recognized aloud to the audience and to the second computer/performer. The second computer/performer will listen to the poem composed by the first computer and read back the poem it recognized aloud to the audience. Each computer and human has its own voice and vocal qualities including timbre, speed, etc. They work together to bring meaning to the piece.

This interpretation/reinterpretation creative loop is accompanied with text images on each computer that can be projected. The words twisting around will be projected so that the audience can listen and view the interaction.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)