The Overlapping Authorship of Intersemiotic Machine Translation in Electronic Literature

Paper

In my digital humanities training and research, as well as my own artistic practice, I very interested in the overlapping edges of machine and human acts of translation, within e-literature in particular. I find the need to further examine the effects of the disappearing borders of more "traditional" language-to-language that occur with digital tools and/or in digital spaces (such as Google Translate) especially urgent, and believe that these digital ecosystems are in dire need of examination and activation as the contemporary global village necessitates, often textual, communication. As such, I propose to argue for a critical posthuman ethics when undertaking arguments and interrogations of such translation acts, in particular those that involve intersemiotic translation. At their base, digital computing devices depend on intersemiotic translation (electric pulses to human-readable language), but when those devices are folded into research and artistic practices, the boundaries between human and machine acts of translation disintegrate.

Takeaway

The audience will receive a brief theorizing of translation in general, as well as brief update on the current state of machine translation. From this , I will give a number of contemporary examples of digital humanities projects that utilize different machine species, enabled by various software and hardware, to illustrate how the 2018 act of machine translation is a deeply symbiotic process that strips out a human-centric view of translation. Such a perspective will be useful to scholars of e-literature, but also to researchers of digital humanities who are perhaps looking to enact alternate modes of research that might involve "non-traditional" modes of research (involving, for example, 3D printers); such discussion is further bolstered by my expertise (and publications) concerning 3D printing in the humanities.

While not the focus of my talk, I will also quickly outline two of my current collaborative artistic projects, the ChessBard and Loss Sets and give opportunities to have the audience ask specific questions about my arguments in relation to these projects. Briefly, the ChessBard translates chess games into poems and the website, chesspoetry.com, also includes a playable version of the engine that allows a player to, in real-time, play a chess-computer AI and have their own and the computer's game translated into poems (http://chesspoetry.com/play/). Loss Sets, translates poems into 3D models which are then printed using 3D printers (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/). I will be able to bring in one such sculpture as a mode of illustrating my arguments.

Abstract

John Cayley argues that "Language is something that is readable by humans; code is something that is executable by (currently) Turing machines. One may be tempted to write 'readable by machines' as characterizing code ontology, but this would be a metaphoric, anthropocentric usage, disguising and glossing over the fact that most code – especially as it runs – is far from being either readable or executable by humans" (12). If, as Caley argues, the act of "reading" is ontologically specific to humans and language, then we should consider whether "translating," when embedded within code, requires the same human-centric focus. By taking into account Lev Manovich's "remediation" and "recoding" (2002, 2013), this paper argues that any consideration of reading, writing, and translation in 2016 is a posthuman action and, as such, will advocate for a critical posthumanist mode of engagement in specifically acknowledging the co-operative machine species that accompany translation in e-literature.

Pramod K Nayar describes critical posthumanism as "an ethical project that asks us to ponder, and act, upon the acknowledgement that life forms have messy intertwined histories… It asks us to acknowledge that human hierachization of life forms has resulted in catastrophic effects for/upon animals, forests, plant life and some groups of humans" (31, italics author's). As an "ethical project" that recognizes the ongoing "the process of technologization, based on the idea of a radical interdependence or mutual interpenetration" between human, animal and machine species (20), "translation" in cooperation with machines encapsulates the symbiotic human-machine density of a 2016 user, wherein the act is a dense ecosystem of simultaneous and multiple actions and authors, rooted most deeply in Roman Jakobson's notion of intersemiotic translation (1959) and the Deleuzian notion of repetition (1968).

Works like Brian Joseph Davies' The Composites and The Trope Tank's The Heftings Project and Renderings, as well as my own ChessBard and Loss Sets, demonstrate that when a text in translation is approached as a series of literary systems, then machine elements add the "chaos" that Walter Benjamin and Deleuze finds so necessary to literature; further, such translation demonstrates the element of chance that Marcel Duchamp and OULIPO writers sought as a mode to escape immediate human rationality and move those translation from code to the linguistic. It is essential then that any contemporary act of translation grapples with the interpenetration of machine components into that act, and from this argument, e-literature in particular holds great ethical potential for surfacing the active and intelligent involvement of those machine species.