Hofstadter_translation_commentary

The passage we will examine is taken from an obituary of the novelist Françoise Sagan, written by the literary critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, and which appeared in the highly respected national newspaper Le Monde in September of 2004. The paragraph we selected is written in elegant and evocative but standard French, readily understood by any literate native speaker. We did not choose it for its difficulty; indeed, its density of “traps” for a translator is no higher than that of any typical article in Le Monde.

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In the obituary paragraph, when we humans read “les revers de casino”, we do not think of backhand strokes in games with rackets, but of setbacks in gambling, because we are familiar with the kinds of things that go on in casinos. When we humans read “les caprices de la banque”, knowing that the context is one of casinos, we don’t think about financial institutions where we save our money but about the casino’s own storehouse of money, because we understand what gambling is about. And when we humans read about “les caprices du ciel”, we don’t think of the whims of the atmosphere, nor about whims of the starry sky, nor of the color blue; we think of the mysterious heavenly forces that someone might imagine as governing the rolls of dice and roulette wheels.

And this is because all the foregoing French phrases trigger ideas in our human minds, rather than merely triggering counterpart English phrases, and the evoked ideas fit together into large patterns that trigger large-scale memories, which, only at that stage of the game, evoke English words. The process of translation depends crucially on the intermediate phase in which memories and concepts are triggered — an unavoidable phase usually called “understanding”. And this process involves putting together all the pieces of a sentence in a carefully coordinated manner, which means exploiting all the indications that grammar gives us about how the ideas fit together in a sensible pattern. No translation worthy of the term can afford to ignore the meaning of the text to be translated, and meaning can be grasped only if complex grammatical constructions are taken into account, which means making a precise linguistic analysis of the text, which today’s translation engines are unable to do.

Consider just one example from our obituary paragraph. The last sentence opens as follows: “Qui ne l’a pas vue « récupérer » en quelques quarts d’heure les pertes de toute une nuit…”. There arises the question of why an “e” has been tacked onto the past participle “vu” of the verb “voir” (“to see, to watch”). This is a question of French grammar, and its answer is that whenever a past participle is preceded by its direct object, it must agree in gender and in number with that object. That little “e” is therefore telling us that the direct object of the verb “voir” is feminine and singular. It carries a crucial meaning! It tells us that a thing or a person of feminine gender is being watched (or rather, since the verb is negated, that this thing or person is not being watched). And indeed, the text is talking about failing to see an “entity” (possibly an animate one) that was quickly recovering from the losses of an all-night gambling session. We instantly realize that this “entity” is in fact none other than Françoise Sagan. The past participle’s feminine singular ending has clued us in, but both the 2004 and 2009 engines were clueless. To ignore grammar is to invite disaster.

Could a good mastery of French grammar conceivably have helped the translation engines? That is a rhetorical question, whose answer is “yes”, of course. Translation depends on understanding, and understanding depends on grammar, because grammar tells us how the smaller pieces fit together to make a large, coherent structure.