Translation is More Than Communication
A journey through time from interlinear translation to Google Translate
Translation is commonly understood as the practice of transferring verbal meaning from one language to another. Yet this conception doesn’t do justice to how translation actually works, and how it rearranges words as it moves across languages.
My co-author Kayvan Tahmasebian and I decided to engage with the complexities of translation by introducing Iranian poet Bijan Elahi’s translations of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin into Persian.
We are interested in this issue for many other reasons beyond our specific interest in Elahi, including the writing of poetry, poetry translation, and the way in which language mediates consciousness. As Kayvan has written to me, predicting the potential applications of our theory of translation:
The results of our continued research on this topic can enrich the attempts to develop virtual translators like Google Translate. I’ve been taking notes about the possibilities of formulating this temporal structure in the framework of set theory and algebraic sequence.
