"Stoliarny Lane" (or "Place"). This was the choice of translator number 2,
who gave the translation as "Stoliarny Place".
What about number 3? This is the most interesting of all. This transla-
tion says "Carpenter's Lane". And why not, indeed? After all, "stoliar"
means "carpenter" and "ny" is an adjectival ending. So now we might
imagine ourselves in London, not Petrograd, and in the midst of a situation
invented by Dickens, not Dostoevsky. Is that what we want? Perhaps we
should just read a novel by Dickens instead, with the justification that it is
"the corresponding work in English". When viewed on a sufficiently high
level, it is a "translation" of the Dostoevsky novel-in fact, the best possible
one! Who needs Dostoevsky?
We have come all the way from attempts at great literal fidelity to the
author's style, to high-level translations of flavor. Now if this happens
already in the first sentence, can you imagine how it must go on in the rest
of the book? What about the point where a German landlady begins
shouting in her German-style Russian? How do you translate broken Rus-
sian spoken with a German accent, into English?
Then one may also consider the problems of how to translate slang and
colloquial modes of expression. Should one search for an "analogous"
phrase, or should one settle for a word-by-word translation? If you search
for an analogous phrase, then you run the risk of committing a "Campbell's
soup" type of blunder; but if you translate every idiomatic phrase word by
word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is desirable, since the
Russian culture is an alien one to s.peakers of English. But a speaker of
English who reads such a translation will constantly be experiencing,
thanks to the unusual turns of phrase, a sense-an artificial sense-of
strangeness, which was not intended by the author, and which is not
experienced by readers of the Russian original.
Problems such as these give one pause in considering such statements
as this one, made by Warren Weaver, one of the first advocates of transla-
tion by computer, in the late 1940's: "When I look at an article in Russian, I
say, 'This is really written in English, hut it has been coded in some strange
symbols. I will now proceed to decode.' "1 Weaver's remark simply cannot
be taken literally; it must rather be considered a provocative way of saying
that there is an objectively describable meaning hidden in the symbols, or at
least something pretty close to objective; therefore, there would be no
reason to suppose a computer could not ferret it out, if sufficiently well
programmed.
High-Level Comparisons between ProgramsWeaver's statement is about translations between different natural lan-
guages. Let's consider now the problem of translating between two com-
puter languages. For instance, suppose two people have written programs
which run on different computers, and we want to know if the two pro-
grams carry out the same task. How can we find out? We must compare the
programs. But on what level should this be done? Perhaps one program-(^380) Minds and Thoughts