Annie Dillard + Google Translate = ??

When the weight of the world feels especially heavy, as it currently does, I seek solace in … language. Lately, I’ve been particularly fascinated by Google Translate, the free translating tool that supports a jaw-dropping 240 languages.

If you travel to Croatia and want to order Borscht in the local tongue, Google Translate will show you how to do it in seconds flat: Mogu li dobiti zdjelicu boršča? If you press the little bullhorn icon, you can even hear how to pronounce it.  

How handy is that?

The tool is instructive (and fun!) in other ways as well.

For example, try this exercise:

Pull a book off your bookshelf, open it to any page, and use Google translate to convert a sentence or two into another language of your choice. Next, reverse that translation back into English via the same tool. How does it compare to the original version?

I tried this using the following passage from Annie Dillard’s memoir An American Childhood:

There was a whole continentful of people passing through, native-born and immigrant men and women who funneled down Pittsburgh, where two rivers converged to make a third river.  

When I translated the passage into German, then reverse engineered it back into English, I wound up with this:  

An entire continent was filled with travelers: natives and immigrants, men and women, streaming into Pittsburgh, where two rivers converged to form a third.

The second version is pretty darn close to the original, but not quite the same. It’s four words shorter. And the meaning has changed in small but significant ways. The native-born have become natives. “Immigrant” has gone from adjective to noun. The Pennsylvania frontier (as described by Dillard earlier) has suddenly become an entire continent.

Just for kicks, I translated the same Dillard passage into Swahili and back again. Here’s the result:

There was an entire continent full of passing people, native born and immigrant men and women who went below Pittsburgh, where two rivers met to make a third river.

This version arguably (and surprisingly) adheres more closely to the original, although the meaning of “passing” has changed, and “funneled down” becomes the more prosaic “went below.”        

Finally, I added one more twist to the exercise: I translated the original Dillard passage into German, translated that version into Swahili, then converted that result back into English….

… and this came out:

The entire continent was filled with passers-by: natives and immigrants, men and women, flocking to Pittsburgh, where two rivers joined to form a third river.

This version is arguably crisper than the original. It’s also less colorful. It doesn’t capture the tumultuous flow of people to the city, the way it feels like a vast and roiling melting pot as it does when Dillard describes “a whole continentful of people…funneling down Pittsburgh.”

I concede that we are hip-deep in the river weeds by now. But hear me out: There’s a point to these exercises and all this nitpicking over a translation tool.  

I would contend that these examples illustrate the tool’s limitations. Google Translate is great for ordering borscht in Zagreb, but it’s not so great for translating complex sentences. That’s because translation is about more than matching words. It’s about capturing context and nuance. It’s about conveying the funnel and flow of words, the way they feel and sound, which quite often is beyond the ken of a machine, even one powered by AI.

At the turn of the last century, Herbert Cushing Tolman, a renowned professor of Classical Greek, compared trained translators to painters. They “enter more deeply into the soul of nature,” he argued, and understand the “powerless of the brush to portray all that is in the landscape.”  

Tolman went on to write that translating is about arousing in the reader “the identical emotions and sentiments that were aroused in him who read or heard the sentence as his native tongue.”

I don’t discount the power and promise of AI in many areas of our lives. But when it comes to conveying emotions and sentiment, I wholeheartedly believe that humans still have a leg up.

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What’s your take on translation, and on Google translate? Have a fun translation to share? Please feel free to leave a comment below!