translation

Amid the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), a man named John Peter developed a peculiar system allowing for the procedural generation of Latin poetry. A decade later, in 1677, Peter's system was published in a landmark booklet, titled "Artificial Versifying," whose subtitle proclaims that anyone "that only knows the A.B.C. and can count 9" may use it to produce "true Latin, true verse, and good sense" [1].The system itself centers on six tables in which letters are distributed across grids of cells. To generate a line of poetry, the user first produces a string of six digits (e.g., "952129"). Next, each digit is used to retrieve a sequence of letters from the table corresponding to that digit's position in the string. The letters obtained from a given table form one of nine words contained in that table, and the concatenation of the six chosen words constitutes a line of Latin verse in dactylic hexameter. The system is capable of generating 9^6, or 531,441, lines of verse.As a bizarre forerunner of electronic literature, "Artificial Versifying" was wildly successful: the booklet appeared in three editions, and its procedure was reprinted in books and periodicals for the next 200 years [2-5]. Sadly, Peter's innovative system has received scant treatment by scholars working in this area today [6-9]. This limited coverage is incommensurate to its importance as a groundbreaking work produced centuries ahead of its time. Indeed, its combinatorial method is similar to those employed in early computer poetry, such as Theo Lutz's "Stochastische Texte" [10-11].We have carried out the first translation into English of the "Artificial Versifying" system. While it would be easy to translate any one of the 531,441 hexameter verses that the system can produce, we sought instead to translate the system itself into English. This only entailed translating the 54 words in the six tables, but the process raised a number of interesting challenges nonetheless. The major difficulty is in preserving both meaning and meter, and in total we identified twelve features of the original system that we sought to maintain. In wrangling with interrelations between these features at the level of combinatorics, our design space was not unlike Peter's. While a core aim of this process has been to make "Artificial Versifying" accessible to non-Latin speakers today, this act of translation has helped us to better appreciate the triumph of the system's design.While our project seeks to celebrate an unheralded pioneering effort in the area that became electronic literature, we situate this work amid emerging scholarship on the challenges and opportunities of translating computational textual artifacts. This subarea of translation studies [12] is perhaps best characterized by the Renderings project carried out by Nick Montfort, Piotr Marecki, and other collaborators in the last decade [14-17], though others have taken it up [18-21]. In this paper, we will show that the peculiar considerations inherent in the translation of computational textual artifacts are already present in protocomputational works that are sufficiently procedural, such as "Artificial Versifying."

The second of the monthly 2020 Virtual ELO Salons was held via Zoom on Tuesday, March  10.  Dutch artist and writer Annie Abrahams (living in France), who had volunteered to facilitate the second ELO Virtual Salon, proposed a “reariting” session using Zoom and the collaborative writing environment Framapad centered on “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric,” a multimedia text by Lily Robert-Foley a writer and translator who is an active member of Outranspo: a motley group of multilingual translators, writers, researchers and musicians who joyously devote themselves to creative approaches to translation, primarily through monthly virtual meetings. http://www.outranspo.com/

Explaining why she proposed this text and a “reariting” approach to it, Abrahams commented, “‘reariting’ is the act of simultaneous reading and writing together on the Internet. This session, which is based on the ideas explored in my Reading Club project that I developed with Emmanuel Guez, is not about producing a text together, but about using ‘reariting’ as a technique to think through a text together.  In the process we will produce a new text with an undetermined status that we will collectively discuss after our rewriting session.” 

To facilitate the session, Abrahams, via the group Zoom call, first briefly introduced Robert-Foley’s work and then sent the essay “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric” to each of he participants via e-mail.  The text, a four page document that, at first, appears to be an academic article about translation strategies, slowly reveals itself as something that may not be what it at first appears to be.  With time, the reader becomes aware that if what they are reading is an academic article it is quite unlike anything they have read before. Each participant read the text and then “met” up in the Framapad collaborative writing environment, where they explained and explored their understandings, misunderstandings, reactions to, and asides related to the text they had just read.  After one hour, the participants reconnected on Zoom to review, discuss, and evaluate the experience, the process, and the results.

The first of the monthly Virtual ELO Salons was held via Zoom on Tuesday, February 11.  At that pre-global-pandemic time, we all felt we were engaging in something quite new by meeting virtually via Zoom.  Obviously, we did not know then that our virtual meetings would become the new “normal” for social and professional interactions worldwide.  The Russian poet, translator, and scholar Kirill Azernyi courageously volunteered to facilitate the first ELO Virtual Salon and selected a section of an untitled poem by the contemporary Russian poet Nika Skandiaka for the participants to discuss.  

Explaining why he proposed this particular text for discussion, Azernyi explained, “I was interested in selecting a text that would require some engagement by readers in constructing its basic meaning. Rather than inviting a traditional ‘interpretation,’ Skandiaka's poems suggest the need for readers to engage in a process of ‘solving’ many issues aesthetically.  In this text, in particular, we might initially attempt to read it as a traditional poem but find the text resisting these attempts. Instead, we may need to start reading this text as being constructed (‘work in progress’), noticing paradigmatic relations of used patterns over the syntagmatic ones (based on word collocations). Some questions that will need to be addressed include: How can we combine a pattern-based approach to reading while still taking into account the expressive role of each part? This text gives us no illusion of 'life-like-ness' (even in the terms of syntactic plausibility as described by Kristeva), and I see it as a great opportunity to think about how our aesthetic feeling of a text is constructed, and how this correlates with formal intertextual relations that we may or may not be able to readily ’make sense’ of." 

While Sandiaka’s text proved to be a challenging and highly “open” one, the eight participants involved in the Virtual Salon had a very lively conversation via video, Zoom text chat, and a shared Google document.  We generally disagreed on the extent to which the text "made sense."  And, one of the more interesting discussions related to this question was how much more forgiving readers tend to be of nonsense generated by machines than by human poets.  We also spent a great deal of time discussing the numbers in the piece, how to read them and how and what they might signify or not signify. We also, eventually, figured out how to access the performative aspect of this work by practicing different approaches to reading sections of it out loud to one another during the Zoom conference call.

Out of our discussion also came a couple of interesting ideas for collaborative  projects: 1/ have all of us read the poem aloud and make a synthesized recording of our different readings.  2/ read the poem to a speech to text translator and see what was generated by that. Additionally, we speculated on how disjunctive syntax pushes us towards establishing paradigmatic relations within a work, and how this paradigmatic network could replace syntax and agreed that in fact we don't have to choose between these options (to read text "syntagmatically" or "paradigmatically"), but are able to practice all possible approaches simultaneously which would give us access to both semantic and structural aspects of the work.  Finally, we thought about how much such an open and electronic work needs to be read "electronically,” a term that we all agreed we would continue thinking about and talking about moving forward.  

This paper proposes a typology for studying Chinese text-based playable media (e.g. interactive installations, screen-based works, computer games) in terms of the freedom of user interaction with the Chinese characters. In the last two decades, various typologies/models/categories have been proposed to systematize the research of electronic literature and text-based digital art (Seiça, 2012). These classifications focus on different aspects of digital works, including but not limited to: visual experience of users, aesthetic principles, interactive features, technologies applied and structure of codes (Campas, 2004; Hayles, 2008; Strehovec, 2015). Although dissecting electronic literature with such diverse angles, these classifications are all based on examples of alphabetical languages and pay little attention to the abilities (freedom) of the user deconstructing and manipulating the basic linguistic units in the works. The Chinese language differentiates itself from any alphabetical-based languages by containing a huge number of graphemes instead of a dozens of letters. This creates a problem of how to input Chinese characters into western originated machines (from typewriter to computer) (Mullaney, 2017). In most of the modern commercial digital systems, all useable characters must be listed on the Unicode table as an alphanumeric code. However, these codes are arbitrarily assigned and make no sense for human users. People always need to input another set of codes or data, often based on the phonetic or written structure of a character, to the inputting software which will call the corresponding Unicode from the operating system. This handling of characters through “reinterpreting and rendering” (Cayley, 2003, p.281) is the norm of all Chinese computer systems. However, many Chinese text-based playable works intentionally or unintentionally sabotage such process flow and challenge the limitation imposed by the computer systems. Since this is a unique condition in Chinese-based works, this proposed typology will be based on the difference of how users manipulate the characters in the examined works and what extra freedom has been provided in comparison to consumer applications. This typology is not only needed for categorizing the characteristics of Chinese text-based playable media for future research, but can also provide a ground for systematically analyzing the difference between character-based and alphabetical-based languages in digital interacting environment. 

Over a year and a half ago, a group of scholars, programmers, artists and translators started working on a research project focusing on the translation of various works of electronic literature, ranging from e-poetry (Maria Mencia’s The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic), digital database (Luís Lucas Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet), installation (Søren Pold et al’s The Poetry Machine), digital aurature (digital language art in programmable aurality) (John Cayley’s The Listeners) and hyperfiction (Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story). In order to identify common and divergent issues depending on the genres, formats and languages of the works under study, they were all examined through the prism of the following concepts: Translinguistic translation (translation between languages), Transcoding (translation between machine-readable codes and between machine-readable codes and human-readable text), Transmedial translation (translation between medial modalities), and Transcreation (translation as a shared creative practice).

 One of the recurring questions raised throughout the project was: how interventionist/creative should our translation/remediation be as we are also touching upon the very materiality of the works? A current theme has been to combine the cybertextual or software dimensions with the textual, semantic dimensions and to discuss translation as much as a translation of processes as the (finished) product of a particular tradition of translinguistic practice. Some of the theoretical terms for this has been the concept of electronic tropes, “radical mediation” (Richard Grusin), and how different languages relate to each other in ways that cannot be revealed. With Walter Benjamin, we could also ask whether translation is “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,” including the question of code in our reflection.

 This roundtable will give the members of the project the opportunity to share their observations on their collective endeavors; bridging the gap between the practice-based approach and a theoretical perspective on the task of translating electronic literature. In addition to a brief presentation of each work and the specific challenges they raised, the participants will offer key insights into the collective methodologies elaborated throughout the duration of the project.

Renderings – a project devoted to the translation of e-lit works into English. The poster is devoted to the Renderings project established at MIT at the Trope Tank lab headed by Nick Montfort. As the project's website explains: "The Renderings project focuses on translating highly computational and otherwise unusual literature into English. [The participants] not only employ established literary translation techniques, but also consider how computation and language interact." The poster defines and explains basic terms and phenomena relevant to the project, like highly computational literature, expressive processing, and platform studies, and presents the specifics of chosen genres of electronic literature. It discusses the general principles of the project (organizational structure, languages, direction of the translation, types of works included) and the anatomy of chosen e-lit works. The main part of the poster is a step by step analysis of the translation process, which involves not only the level of text, familiar to literary translation, but also the way computational processes function and are programmed. The analysis draws from the methodology developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies and expressive processing. The poster is prepared collaboratively by the group of researches and translators affiliated with the Renderings project.