Week 9

I find the piece “Machine Translation and Global English” quite fascinating. I think indeed English has come to be viewed by many people as a universal language and many people look to English as the piece puts it: “the master code and origin of all other languages.” Obviously, this sort of view presents problems and can frankly be viewed as colonialist. However I think there is an interesting additional point that can be developed based on this dilemma. By virtue of how translation works, it is a function. That is to say given some input it produces an output, hopefully coherent in a different language for example translating Spanish to English. However the interesting point here is that a function can only produce one output to every input but this is somewhat incongruous with how language functions in actuality. There is more than one way to say a certain thing and it seems this may be lost in translation. Furthermore, as translation softwares must select a dialect and register to translate into, e.g. “Basic English” as referred to in the piece, so do other dialects and registers fall by the wayside. This too may be fraught with problems. Different people have different ways of speaking the same language and by selecting a standard form of a language, the other forms are ignored and obscured. As translation by machines becomes more significant in society, so too does the magnitude of this potentially harmful effect. For example, certain minority communities have developed their own dialects of English here in the US, e.g. Ebonics. If machine translators ignore this and only translate into Standard English, this may have the effect of furthering the divide between different communities.