A lecture by Ross Sutherland
30min, 16+
For the last twelve years, I have been running famous poems, image-by-image, through Internet translation programs (such as Babelfish). The results of this process then get edited down and become new coherent poems in their own right.
In The Shallowing Shovel, I read a selection of these electronic poems, written in collaboration between myself and the translation software (my ‘co-author’). But like most science fiction stories that involve people being friends with robots, I eventually discover that my co-author is plotting to destroy me. As the story unravels, it becomes apparent that the poems conceal a secret manifesto- one that threatens to bring about the end of global communication as we know it.
The lecture gives an overview of the principles of automatic translation technology, examining its strange coupling of language and mathematics. The lecture discusses how heavily integrated these programs have become to the fabric of our communication networks. It discusses the dangers that this integration can cause. Translation software, rather than free individuals from speaking English, can potentially enforce its own prescriptive lingua franca: a new privatised language, controlled by private businesses.
The lecture draws comparisons across several separate disciplines, including language philosophy, new media studies, linguistics and social theory. Machine translation’s relationship with language philosophy is of particular interest: as post-structuralism became accepted into university campuses in the 1970s, all development into machine translation was dropped. Yet, now that private investors are funding MT, the philosophical arguments brought up by left-wing campus academics are no longer heard. In this respect, The Shallowing Shovel opens debate on the self-legitimising nature of privately invested research.
There are several other messages in the lecture: One is to highlight the limitations of current technology concerning the analysis of language. Another is to look at how this shortfall can be used creatively- that faults can be championed and exploited to create new forms of expression.
The Shallowing Shovel is a light-hearted introduction to these ideas, based on content from my own academic research into Electronic Literature at Liverpool John Moores’ University.
This lecture has previously been aired at Late At Tate, Imperial College London, and the London Word Festival.
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Me trying out some of my translation poems on an unsuspecting audience at the Poetry Cafe, October 2008.