Translation Praised
‘Then, of course, there is Artificial, or Inhuman, Intelligence. Thanks to it, translation is mechanised. Feed in some verses by, say, Li Bai, a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, and you find them spewed out in the twinkling of an eye in colloquial American, contractions and all. AI does not limit itself to rendering a given ‘foreign’ language into another. It offers to translate even the vaguest notions that arise out of our fancy’s pond-fog into cogent speech. As a result, we can increasingly dispense ourselves from coming up with our own words. There are, here and there, pragmatic advantages to this. But they come at the cost of catastrophic loss. For what will man turn into as he, formed in the image of the Word, surrenders poetry to algorithmic patterns, logos to digits, with everyone’s speech, everywhere, sounding the same?’
From this year’s Erasmus Lecture, to be published on the internet and in First Things in mid-December.
