In this most nuanced of subject areas, a singular or literal interpretation is often the most damaging or damning. Yet, whether out of ignorance or hostility, these early Christian translations were often woefully devoid of cultural understanding. Centuries of Arab astronomy and mathematics had made Arabic-Latin bilingualism a matter of scientific necessity. Arabic-to-Latin translation services were in no short supply. The Christian preoccupation with Muslim belief, which became obsessive during the Crusades, resulted in the first European attempts to make sense of the Quran. Some of history’s most ambitious translation projects have failed just as miserably to notice or bridge the cultural gap between what is said and what is meant.
The dangers inherent in this acultural approach to foreign source material did not begin with the invention of the robotic interpreter. The French idiom se taper le cul par terre, for example, is understood by every Francophone as ‘to laugh heartily’ and has little to do with the literal definition offered by Google – ‘ass banging on the floor’. The problem lies in the machine’s inability to consider the cultural context that gives each word its meaning Mistranslations across the widest cultural gulfs abound. However, the one-dimensionality of machine translation restricts the response of the on-screen polyglot to a singular, literal definition of each word or phrase. Today Google offers translation services in and out of more than 70 languages, meeting the needs of the monolingual student generation with ever increasing efficiency and popularity. In 2006 Google launched its pioneering ‘Google Translate’ service, offering instant on-screen translations between English and Modern Standard Arabic. The same period of time has witnessed the ‘rise of the machine translators’.
In the past 15 years more than a third of UK universities stopped offering specialist modern European language degrees, arguing that rigorous marking at A-level had deterred teenagers from studying languages at school. This slump has taken its toll on the university system. Research published in June this year by the Confederation of British Industry revealed that one in five schools in England had a persistently low take-up of languages, after what the government is describing as ‘a decade of damaging decline’. The UK education system is failing to produce enough students with foreign language skills, an indispensable tool for the study of history.
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