(New Media) Translation After Pound

The 20th century turn toward domestication essentially stems form Ezra Pound’s translations, but impurely, through the modern emphasis of the author mixed with the business of selling books.

According to Ronnie Apter in Digging for the Treasure: Translation After Pound, Pound influenced translation theory and practice in three major ways. First, was the move from “Victorian pseudo-archaic translation diction” to modern style. Second, is by arguing for a criticism of the original in some form: not simply the objective transfer (an acknowledged impossibility by the Victorians as well), but to focus on some particular element and thereby “criticize.” And finally, the creation of a new poem: not just something derivative.

These three were all essential breaks with both the Victorian practice, which focused on three criteria: paraphrase with no additions (subtractions were inevitable, but additions were taboo), the reproduction of the author’s traits (just what the traits were was, however, up for grabs), and the reproduction of the overall effect of the text (whether the “effect was of the original on the original’s original audience, or the original on the modern audience who can read the original text is unknown). It was also an adaptation with the contemporaneous translation theory professed by Matthew Arnold and F. W. Newman.

However, while Pound was translating against the Victorian grain, we have come full circle to a new norm. The fashion of the times has changed to one that embraces Pound’s basics, but not the depths. If “great translators transcend the fashion of their times [and] minor ones merely manipulate it” Pound was a great translator, many minor figures have manipulated his transcendence, but Pound himself would simply be one of any in the current fashion. As Lawrence Venuti has argued, the times and dominant style have changed and another transcendental shift is called for.

What I want to argue is that this shift is called for by the media itself. The move from literary page translation to multimedia and digital forms leads into new possibilities for and understandings of translation. In an interesting way, however, it is Pound’s logopoeia, his style of meta-translation, that can still lead the way. Whereas Pound focused on the meaning of words to bring into focus both the older era and the present, a type of dialectical juxtaposition, the move toward searchable, digital data in opposition to static, analogue data allows the simultaneous existence of both data sets and a new type of logopoeia. This new form of meta-translation involves the layering of translational tracks. Instead of juxtaposition, there is the coexistence of both tracks/languages/cultures.

This is similar to the possibilities evoked by subtitles and abuse (Nornes), but it considers the issue in relation to digital, new media and not simply film considered in an analogue manner. Instead of the ability to simply choose one or another track/language, it gives all, or switches between languages. It renders the possibilities of putting three real languages into a game such as Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 (English, Russian and Japanese to use the fictive world), but more meaningfully (and less deliberately/offensively stereotypically), of switching them on the fly so that one game has the US speaking English, the Russians Russian and the Japanese Japanese, but another switches so that the US speaks Japanese, the Russians English and the Japanese Russian. The media uses its ability to draw from the swappable data files not to simply replace one with another, thereby changing one representation into another, but to abuse the user with a constant active experience that questions the submerged normativity of language that exists with translated entertainment products (games in particular) at present.

Somebody out there must like Alice…

I’ve been doing work with William Huber recently on Kingdom Hearts, transmediation and adaptation. An amusing example related to Alice in Wonderland:

The claim that unbirth from the upcoming PSP version is a mistranslation is, I believe, rather false. Why? Because somebody out there likes Alice rather a lot.

=

= Unbirth

Editors and Translators – On Saussure

As I read Jonathan Culler’s Ferdinand de Saussure, the difference between editors and translators is striking. Or rather, their similarity and yet complete perceived difference is striking.

In chapter one Culler notes, “Most teachers would shudder at the thought of having their views handed on in this way, and it is indeed extraordinary that this unpromising procedure, fraught with possibilities of misunderstanding and compromise, should have produced a major work” (Culler p. 25).  He then ends the chapter with the claim that he “shall not hesitate to rectify the original editors’ occasional lapses” (Culler p. 26).

Saussure is the origination point of the Course in General Linguistics. Nobody questions this. However, what of the status of Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, the “editors” to which Culler refers? Saussure’s colleagues, Bally and Sechehaye, gathered three terms’ worth of students’ notes, combined them, ordered them, limited them and in so doing made the Course. Culler calls them editors, and yet could he not also call them translators? What really is the difference?

Bally and Sechehaye are forgiven for their mistakes and counted as a problematic (but necessary) medium from Saussure to air to students to notes to editors. As such, Culler has no qualms about correcting their “lapses.” But how is this any different in the case of Wade Baskin, the English translator of the French original, or any other translator?

An editor is somebody that changes something for the benefit of general understanding. Editors are hated and partially antagonistic to the idea of the author, but are also considered a necessary part of the process. A translator is somebody that changes a text into a different form: it is not for general benefit, but specific benefit to a particular audience, whether that be temporally or spatially separated from the origin. In this case, Saussure in French… and in his classrooms between 1907 and 1911.

So, the Course is a translation of Saussure’s lectures just as the English translation of the Course In General Linguistics is a translation of a translation. And yet they aren’t considered as such, there is an assumed difference between the editors and the translators. Editing is different from translating.

But this makes little sense. They all move the text on, allow it to live, but necessarily alter it.

Protest + Game = ?

At base, protest and play are in opposition. Play is the interaction with rules. There are rules, people break them and form emergent properties that become the new rules and game. Play is working with rules. In opposition, a protest works directly against the rules. A protest means to destroy rules or the system, not to adapt them (despite the possibility that this is all that might eventually happen). Protest and game run against each other but are they combinable?

State of Emergency is about rampaging. It’s about things related to protests, but while it has tie ins with the Seattle WTO protests it really isn’t related. There are also various Sim/Civ-esque games based around revolution, but again these are not exactly about protest, but the reinstitution of order.

Would it be possible to create a game that systematically broke the idea of rules by causing the constant creation of new rules through their breaking? It would maintain entertainment/pleasure by giving out points, awards, or achievements for disruption and for changing the system itself? Instead of giving people the ban hammer for cracking the code, breaking the rules, or finding interesting use of mechanics, it would reward the players. I suppose this is really called “life” and “hacking,” but what if, what if…

What Type of World is it Again?

I’m sure the above is not something you need to question if you’ve sat through Disneyland’s Small World ride in either its new or old forms. We all know it’s a small world; we all know that all the people in the world are represented; we all know that everybody’s cute, singing oh so happy. What you/we might not know are some of these interesting particulars.

Like that in each of the rooms there exist Disney characters: Lilo and Stitch in the island/Hawaiian area, Aladdin in the Arabian world and so on and so forth. Is the world Disney or is Disney the world? And just what is the relationship between the Orientalist fantasy of Aladdin and whatever we may claim Disney(land) is?

And again, what of the happy warnings in the beginning that rotate between English to French to Spanish to English to Japanese to Spanish to English to German to Spanish and on ad infinum. Obviously that says something about the French, Japanese and German visitors, dying to hear the message about keeping their arms and legs inside the tram as well as those visitors that don’t get a personalized message. But it also says so much about the relationship between English and Spanish in a park, and corner of the country, that is indebted to Spanish speaking workers.

So what type of world are we in again? This time let’s not just call it small, or fun, or even troubled, but perhaps complicated.

Thoughts on DAC – Faux 8 Bit

I got a pleasant surprise on the first day of the recent Digital Arts and Culture conference at Irvine when I attended the Brett Camper’s paper talk “Fake Bit: Imitation and Limitation.” You see, it’s the first time I’ve encountered somebody else dealing with these new/old games.

What I’ve been discussing as remakes and demakes and framing around repetition, nostalgia, and history he discussed in terms of camp, revivalism while focusing on faux 8 bit game production and in particular, La Mulana, which was initially an imitation MSX game for the PC and is now being remade as WiiWare.

Thoughts on DAC – Programmers and Humanitists

The conference Digital Arts and Culture is meant to combine various people from various fields in order to talk and work. It’s interdisciplinary. It also seems to combine people who are in multiple disciplines. It’s multidisciplinary. Unfortunately, the result has similar pitfalls to the standard woes of disciplines. Namely: a) you go to what you know b) there are multiple sessions at any given time c) these sessions roughly break down into humanities, arts and computer science. These three end up meaning that the three groupings have much more limited interaction than might otherwise happen.

I have two examples to elaborate.

1.

On the first day there was a panel on Software Studies. In it Aden Evens gave a talk on Programming and Fold (or Edge as he changed it to). The talk was interesting, but it was to a room filled with programmers who were mumbling and stirring in anger during the first half of his talk saying “wrong wrong WRONG!” to themselves and each other. This was offset by the second half when all of the sudden something clicked and they suddenly became interesting as he moved to the second part that he was trying to connect. However, the q/a consisted primarily of people taking him to task for various ways

Now, there are two things that are important here. Aden Evens is, apparently, a humanistist (yes, it’s a clunky word and there might be something better). He has time spent coding, so he’s done his work enough to talk about the programming side and, importantly, present on a panel that’s slightly more focused on the programming side. The second is that he was largely alone in that room as his fellow humanitists were likely off in the embodiment and performance session.

The result is that the two sides did not really interact and the place where they did interact was as if in enemy territory. Even though there was discussion, it was slightly at odds.

2.

The second example is when I presented on the second day. My own talk had been accepted in both the Future of Humanist Inquiry (humanitist) and Software Studies (programmers) sections, but for various reasons I went with the Software Studies side. At my panel there were four people:

  • Scholarly civilization: utilizing 4X gaming as a framework for humanities digital media
    [Elijah Meeks, University of California, Merced]
  • Shaping stories and building worlds on interactive fiction platforms
    [Alex Mitchell, Communications and New Media Programme, National University of Singapore]
    [Nick Montfort, Massachusets Institute of Technology]
  • Translation (is) not localization: language in gaming
    [Stephen Mandiberg, University of California, San Diego]
  • Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media
    [Stephanie Boluk, Department of English, University of Florida]

Of note is that my panel consists of one “refuge from the humanities theme,” one critical geographer, myself (who chose this option and tailored intendingly), and a cs oriented twosome doing slightly more typically programmer things.

The result (and the opposite of the first example) is that questions and discussion was geared completely toward the programming talk. There were some humanitists in the room (I saw them) but they all tended to leave to go in and out. Of the 20 minutes of Q/A 18 or so were discussion about the IF presentation. No questions went to the critical geographer. Now, this might be considered a matter of bitching, but i’m really trying to say it’s a matter of disconnect.

For instance, one of the lines of questions into the IF discussion was focused on the movement and particularities of platforms, programming and possibilities of moving between platforms. This is localization, the exact topic that I had been discussing and in a very similar way to which I had been discussing. So similar, in fact, that the chair and I had a glance at eachother before I felt the need to jump in and point out some of the problems with what they were discussing. This is discussion as it should be, yes, but it is also disconnect that the completely obvious link.

DAC then is interdisciplinary, fine. But it’s also very fragmented by the mentality of doing what’s comfortable, going to the talks that you know, and of course, mingling with the people who are like you.

Multiple Languages

Texts that have had multiple languages within them have been around since forever. Well, possibly not forever, but in one way or another for a rather long time. One might even find that the current mixing of languages that we attribute to globalization and transnationalism is actually not new, but links in with premodern society: that it is Modernity that unnaturally ended the mixing of languages. However, this is something for the future. For now, I simply want to point out the different reactions given to this mixing of languages depending on the media in which it takes place.

Recently I have heard more and more about Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderful Life of Óscar Wao. I finally read it last September. In it the author writes in English, but mixes in pithy spanish phrases and words. These go untranslated and unmarked, and require the reader to actively figure it out. Such a mixture reinforces ideas of postcolonial flow in the current global climate and reproduce what it is to be always within two languages. It is a best selling book, but it is also granted the distinction of literature through academic accolades.

That said, a German I know complained, extensively, that he doesn’t speak Spanish (a native German, he does speak, read and teach fluent English), and used that as a reason for not only putting the book away unfinished, but simply disliking it. I want to point out, first, that this is not the normal reaction to Óscar Wao, but then ask why I can claim any idea of normalcy to this or any other text.

Here I will supply my list of four observations around this:

  1. nobody bitches about made up languages
  2. art is okay, but not ‘wanted’
  3. foreign languages less acceptable than non-languages
  4. games are right out

So, the first is a sort of odd thing to say, but it’s pretty legitimate: nobody complains when somebody goes through the trouble to make up a new language. Examples are 1984‘s Newspeak, Lord of the Ring‘s Elvish and Star Trek‘s Klingon. The first is considered amazing and important, the second equally amazing, and the third completely nerdy, but still, uncritiqued. Nobody complains about them even if a glossary of terms is necessary. Even Neuromancer is considered important in its alternate language even if it makes it slightly difficult.

However, when that alternate is not “legitimately” an alien and just a foreign (with all of the ironies of that statement) language it becomes problematic. Óscar Wao is one example, but there are plenty of others. However, here’s the catch: those others are acceptable in “art” modes, but not as pleasure texts. Entertainment is supposed to be easy, relaxed, the opposite of “work.” Understanding other languages, cultures, people, in short, the foreign, that’s just work, and we can’t have that, so entertainment texts generally have a hidden translation at play, a Babel Fish between strange character and the screen. They might have an accent, but Bond villains all speak English.

Finally, we get to the fourth bit. One of my favorite moments of videogaming is in Onimusha 3 at the beginning when the player, coming from Tokugawa Japan, suddenly finds him/herself in late turn of the 21st century France alongside Jean Reno. This, in itself, is not particularly interesting as timewarping happens disturbingly often in popular cultural texts (temporality, pausing, et cetera are interesting issues in their own right). What is amazing of these few moments is that the Japanese player is forced to interact with both Japanese and French. Sadly, this state is soon avoided by the introduction of a magic spell of some sort that allows Jean Reno to both speak and understand Japanese, which results in the remaining 8/10ths of the game being solely in Japanese.

Multiple languages in games don’t happen. Obviously, I just used an example of it happening, but the point stands that such is very rare. Whereas such multi-linguality is common in other media, grudgingly accepted in others still, it is rejected in yet other media. There is a level of acceptability of mixing languages depending on the media and the content.

thoughts from the plane

On my way to London (and just before) I watched two rather striking movies. Well, they weren’t particularly striking, but they had something that sparked my interest. Nigerians.

Both District 9 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine have rather negative depictions of Nigerians. The former makes them arms, flesh and drug dealers in the alien district in South Africa and the latter turns them into the initial, random group of ‘baddies’ that Wolverine’s team faces off against and in the process display their mutant abilities. Both show Nigerians as black market dealers, as against the main law, as bad guys, but also interesting, as sub bad guys. In both movies they are not the main adversary, they’re represented as the fly that gets in the way, but not the bad bads (who are, in both movies, governmental agencies and the good guys are the rebels).

The second is something that has annoyed me for a long time, but was brought out in different way on the plane. Americans leave the movie early. By early, I mean before the credits finish rolling. This is not true of all Americans, I’m told, as Los Angelinos stay to the end to see their fellows. However, it’s quite different from Japanese where the movie does not end until the lights rise at the end of the credits and people do not leave until that point.

This observation has a few minor asides:
a) certain movies use gag clips or extra info during the credits to keep people in the audience (one such is Austin Powers), but the question then is whether people pay a whit of attention to the names as they are paying attention to the continued movie.
b) what about the difference between movies with the information at the beginning and the information at the end?

But the plane brought out something even stranger. X-Men Origin: Wolverine’s credits were fast forwarded through. The credit roll went up fast and it was unreadable, but it did go. Why? Is that adding insult to injury, just satisfying legal obligations? Or is it something else?

Castles and/as History for an American

That I’m an American is something I just realized while walking around Edinburgh. Specifically I realized that Disney Castle is a crock and real castles rock.

Slightly more generally I should point out that from the moment I went away to Japan I played with my nationality (just as I’d begun to play with my identity previously). Because of the (then) recent World Trade Center incident I remember reading and being told that Americans abroad should by evasive about their nationality in fear of repercussions against their selves. What this amounted to was a) don’t hang around the US embassy in Tokyo, and b) don’t broadcast that you’re American. For me, it had the added effect that because of my Portland (lack of) accent, being surrounded by an international and Japanese crowd and predominately speaking Japanese I was able to hide my nationality quite well. My accent in Japanese was completely unrecognizable and my English accent was relatively unplaceable, but most guessed somewhere in Europe (also because of my appearance).

So, I have generally thought about nationality and my ‘Americanness’ as something that is easily hide-able, unimportant and generally malleable. Of course, this is a rather obnoxious assumption as my Americanness is, of course, marked in various ways from mannerisms to specific words to those who look, but more importantly, it’s highly related to my understanding of particular terms, concepts and ideas.

I understand theory from a particular cultural perspective. Which is to say that I understand the world as an American. And one of the things that Americans don’t understand is History with a capital H that goes back into the architecture and ground. Sure, some cities on the east coast go back a few hundred years now and places have been around for a hundred plus years, but there certainly aren’t any castles or five hundred year old under layers of the city that have been built over.

So if Baudrillard and every other continental theorist must make the trip to California to see Disneyland and find simulacra, America, late capitalism, or whatnot, perhaps it is just as ‘necessary’ for Americans to go and see castles, cobbled roads, and old skinny streets to understand history and the real.

Everything is relative. This much is known. So maybe the relative understanding of the present depends on your knowledge of the past, real or simulation (or representation), etc.

Such were my thoughts before going to Edinburgh Castle, but having seen it from various vantage points around the city. Having done the castle visit I’m not quite as enlightened as I might have been, but it was interesting for a number of reasons.

Primarily, the castle was interesting because it was a glorified museum. Things were blocked off, things were accessible, people were funneled through the different sections to get pumped up info about topics from the history of Scotland and war (the predominant aspect of the information), the history of the crown jewels, the castle’s renovation as a prison, the rooms where Mary Queen of Scots was born, etc. The strange part to me is that the castle becomes the site of a museum for various things at the same time that it embodies (minimally) history.

However, the building as history did not happen like I somehow thought would be. Part of this is that the process of history entails building over the old things. Placards that announce any give piece of information are new. The books that announce the war dead from years past in one area were from 2008. The cobbled street, which one may guess is rather old is half paved over in some spots and who knows when it was actually cobbled.

There are no placards informing the visitor of when history took place, when it was imagined and altered. Instead, there is simply what ‘happened.’

Second, because the rooms present certain themes they exist outside of their original purpose. Even the birth of the queen of scots etc and the great hall are semi outside of history as it is presented as her birthplace but also some other’s birthplace and they are separated by numerous years. And the great hall seems to host various weapons, but its original purpose is outside of representation. The rooms are a smashup of time. However, the honours are possibly the best example as they are a long, almost Disneylike progression from start to end going through various rooms. The castle goer travels from room to room getting the history of the Honours, the sword, scepter, crown and jewels of Scotland including their making, the hiding for 111 years and finally in the last room one sees the actual objects. Two points of interest are that one sees replicas of the artifacts in almost every room before the final room (perhaps most interesting are the bronze replicas with lots of braille information surrounding them, and a half size sword, right before the final room). The second is that one is walking through rooms of the castle that have been completely reappropriated from whatever their original purpose might have been. You have no idea what the rooms might have been at any given point.

The result of this decontextualization of the space the castle becomes a vantage point to see the city and a place of (military) history, but it is taken out of time.

The ground and place itself, which I immediately thought of as history were turned no more into history than 100 and 200 year old buildings on the east coast of the United States. Which, I guess points to my innocence that there is actually some sort of feeling of time in places that is not history, which is the same whether it’s a day, a decade, a century or a millennia old.