Machine Translation and the Poetics of Noise

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of the death of the Translator, inspired by Barthes’ formulation of the death of the Author. It argues that the death of the Translator is caused by a loss of human agency in translation and is therefore most clearly exemplified in machine translation. Based on an avant-garde bilingual poetry project by a Taiwanese poet, the paper demonstrates that machine translation can churn out unexpected new meanings through unpredictable routes of semantic and syntactic divergences from the source text. The poet’s use of transparency as physical medium and of machine translation as mediator raises the following questions: does translation actually allow us to “read through” a source text? If so, to what extent is such translation “transparent”? How should we even come to terms with the concept of “transparency” with respect to the meaning of a literary text in translation? The paper argues that in the bilingual project in question, machine translation plays the crucial function of bringing the reader’s attention back to the target language by way of delaying/blocking comprehension, hence rendering the corporeality of the target language “transparent”.

羅蘭•巴特曾提出“作者之死”一說。本文受其啟發,擬探討“譯者之死”的概念。筆者認為“​​譯者之死”源於翻譯過程中缺乏人為介入,且在機器翻譯方面表現最為顯著。文章以台灣詩人夏宇的雙語詩集《粉紅色噪音》為分析對象,力求闡釋語義和句法因翻譯過程中偏離原文而出現新生涵義的原因。詩人以透明膠片為物質媒介,機器翻譯為中介手段,此種做法引發筆者思考:翻譯是否可使讀者真正讀“透”原文?倘若可以,其能“透明”至何種程度?就文學翻譯而言,如何詮釋文本意義的“透明性”?《粉紅色噪音》中,機器翻譯以阻滯理解的方式促使讀者關註譯入語,藉此形成譯入語的“透明”物質性。