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Article published In: Literary Translation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Its Future Prospects
Edited by Wang Ning and Wang Hongtao
[Babel 69:4] 2023
► pp. 499–528

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Walter Benjamin as translator as John Henry

Competing with the machine

 | Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00329.rob
Abstract
The article invokes John Henry’s fatal competition with the rock-driving machine, a legendary exemplar of resistance to automation, as a speculative analogue of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” read as a metaphysical attempt to develop a workable alternative to the kind of mechanizable translating he hated. Benjamin’s practical work with Baudelaire and Proust and the others is read tentatively as the forerunners to machine translation eighty-plus years later – working with the meanings of individual words in sentential chunks, striving to organize them along the lines of statistical usage in the target language, and incrementally learning with each translation job to assimilate actual reproductions of sentential meaning more and more accurately to statistical usage. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” by contrast, read as his anti-MT manifesto, opens up to a somatic phenomenology of felt (super)human life.
Résumé
L’article évoque la compétition fatale de John Henry avec la machine à creuser les rochers, exemple légendaire de résistance à l’automatisation, comme un analogue spéculatif de l’essai de Walter Benjamin de 1923 “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”, lu comme une tentative métaphysique de développer une alternative réalisable au type de traduction mécanisable qu’il haïssait. Le travail pratique de Benjamin avec Baudelaire, Proust et les autres est lu prudemment comme une forme de précurseur de la traduction automatique, plus de quatre-vingts ans plus tard – travailler avec les significations de mots individuels dans des morceaux de phrases, s’efforcer de les organiser selon les lignes de l’usage statistique dans la langue cible, et apprendre progressivement avec chaque travail de traduction à assimiler de plus en plus précisément les reproductions réelles de la signification de la phrase à l’usage statistique. En revanche, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”, lu comme son manifeste anti-MT, s’ouvre à une phénoménologie somatique de la vie (sur)humaine ressentie.
Article outline
  • Walter Benjamin as translator as who, now?
  • Walter Benjamin, take one
  • Machine translation, take one
  • Walter Benjamin, take two
  • Machine translation, take two
  • Other paths of most resistance
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (56)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Dougherty, Stephen
2025. From Pure Language to Word Embeddings: Benjamin, Metaphysics, and Machine Translation. Translation Review 121:1 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo

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