The Wilder Shores of Machine Translation: "the Field of Youth Creationism Doritos Taha"

I never use Facebook's built-in translation function unless friends are posting in a language I don't know, but sometimes it seems to translate automatically, not always with the best results:
The second part almost approaches comprehensibility, but "Joey scene appears in the field of youth creationism doritos taha masjid yusuf aga time" is a sublime victory for computer translation running off the rails.

The photo accompanying it is this:

Now let's look at what the caption really says: "Cairo: aerial view of Bab al-Khalq Square; in the midst of it is the Mosque of Yusuf Agha, the Governorate Building, and the Dar al-Kutub (National Library), and the Islamic Museum. At the top of the picture appears Abdeen Palace and the area surrounding it . . . Picture from the thirties of the last century."

It leaps the rails at the beginning, when "aerial view" becomes "Joey scene," though the word for aerial (jawiyy) has clearly been read as "Joey." The square in question, Bab al-Khalq, can be translated as "Gate of the People," or the "Masses," but Khalq can also mean "creation," so I guess that explains "creationism." I don't know where "youth" came from. Any ideas? But the real genius was turning one word in Arabic, يتوسطه, into two, "doritos taha." If you ignore the actual voweling, you might come up with "itostaha," quite wrongly, but the "do-" is nowhere to be found.

Arabic Translation Using Urban Dictionary and Other Topics in Translating Shidyaq

Marcia Lynx Qualey at the Arabic Literature (in English) blog recently attended the Library of Arabic Literature workshop at Oxford and has two posts relating to accomplished translator Humphrey Davies and his translation of Ahmad Faris Shidyaq's novel (or something), Leg Over Leg.

Both posts deserve a read. Brief samples:

"What Does It Matter If ‘Leg Over Leg’ Is the ‘First Arabic Novel’? " 

There was a moment during Saturday’s Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) workshop in Oxford that could’ve been called the “Humphrey Davies & Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq fan club” moment:

Al-Shidyaq was swooned over — in an academic sort of way — for writing the pre-modern-post-modern, genre-bending, gender-bending Leg Over Leg (1855), while Humphrey Davies got his accolades for bringing the book’s insight and exuberance into page-rocking English, with French-English translator Richard Sieburth comparing Davies’ wordwork to Byron’s with its “jolting, jovial quality.”

"Humphrey Davies on ‘Representational Translation’ and the Uses of Urban Dictionary and Google Translate"

This was, he said, the lists of words that are like a “magical invocation” in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s text, through which “an almost surreal affect is achieved.”

“In the middle of a sentence,” Davies said, “you may get a list of words with no definition. Obscure, arcane words; words he did not expect you to know.”An attempt to achieve a one-to-one correspondence of these words, Arabic to English, would be doomed to some kind of failure, Davies said. Indeed, researching the meanings of words and trying to map them to English just didn’t work. “Even if the English language has 248 words for pudendum, you can be pretty much certain that those 248 words will not map accurately onto the words you found in Shidyaq.”

“So I started experimenting with other approaches.”

In the middle of one list, where the narrator is speaking of the charms of women, he also gives antonyms, some of which Davies read off on Saturday: “runts, trolls, long-necked pinheads…”

“And I took these from the Urban Dictionary online,” he said.

Two New Sites for Digitized Arabic Texts

 Not one but two new projects are digitizing Classical Arabic texts online:

• Arabic Collections Online is funded by New York University Abu Dhabi and partner institutions (Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and AUB are reportedly among them) and isays "this mass digitization project aims to expose up to 15,000 volumes from NYU and partner institutions over a period of five years. NYU and the partner institutions are contributing all types of material—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections. ACO will provide digital access to printed books drawn from rich Arabic collections of prominent libraries."

• A somewhat more specialized collection is A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies, a joint project of Harvard and Tufts, is dedicated to digitizing Greek texts and Arabic translation of Greek works, during the 8th to 10th centuries AD.

Elias Muhanna Asks: Why is Disney's "Frozen" Dubbed in Modern Standard Arabic Rather than Colloquial?

An old theme revisited: Colloquial versus Modern Standard Arabic and the diglossia issue. Elias Muhanna, Professor at Brown but perhaps better known as Qifa Nabki for his blog, has a contribution at The New Yorker, "Translating Frozen Into Arabic,"

The Arabic lyrics to “Let It Go” are as forbidding as Elsa’s ice palace. The Egyptian singer Nesma Mahgoub, in the song’s chorus, sings, “Discharge thy secret! I shall not bear the torment!” and “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” From one song to the next, there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by a dancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls. The Arabic of “Frozen” is frozen in time, as “localized” to contemporary Middle Eastern youth culture as Latin quatrains in French rap.

Indeed, he notes that earlier Disney products were dubbed in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic, widely understood due to Egyptian films, and much less formal sounding.

Why Disney decided to abandon dialectal Arabic for “Frozen” is perplexing, and the reaction has been mixed. Many YouTube viewers are annoyed, with some fans recording their own versions of the songs in dialect. An online petition has called for Disney to switch its dubbing back to Egyptian Arabic, plaintively wondering, “How can we watch ‘Monsters University’ in the Heavy Modern Arabic while we saw the first one in Egyptian accent that everybody loved…?”

How indeed? Or perhaps the real question is: Why? Why is Disney willing to commission separate translations of its films for speakers of Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, European French and Canadian French, but is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to Arabic? The answer cannot be that the dialect markets are too small. The population of all of Scandinavia is less than a third of Egypt’s, but is represented by five different translations of “Frozen.” There are nearly ten times as many Moroccans living in Casablanca alone as there are Icelanders in the whole world. The markets are there. What is missing is a constituency for cultural production in dialectal Arabic.

It;s a good question, and apparently many are complaining. The movie will draw lots of kids, being a Disney product, many of whom have only begun to study Modern Standard Arabic in school, so I suspect there is a constituency. (Though of course there's a certain irony in the fact that Elias' nom de blog, Qifa Nabki, alludes to the opening words of the most famous poem in pre-Islamic Classical Arabic.)

The links in the first paragraph above go to various examples on YouTube, but for convenience, here's the megahit "Let it Go," in a formal language no one would actually speak naturally:

The Perils of Google Translate

Via Ajam Media Collective, from a hotel in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan:

Now what has happened here is obvious if hilarious. I presume what is in the pan are some sort of meatballs; someone has transliterated "meatball" into Arabic or Kurdish as mit bul, and someone else has run that through a computer translator to find out how you say "meatball" in English. It has read it as Arabic (I don't know if it would work in Kurdish or not) and come up with "Paul is dead."

Either that or it's another hint in a supposed conspiracy that gave rise to a 1960s urban legend (today it would be an Internet meme) that Paul McCartney of the Beatles secretly died back in 1966. If you played a record backwards it allegedly said "Paul is dead," just like the meatball sign. Sir Paul is feeling much better now.

Don't rely too much on computer translation.

"Translating for Bigots"

M. Lynx Qualey at the Arab Literature (in English) blog reports on a lecture at AUC by Adam Talib called "Translating for Bigots," about translating Arabic literature for Western audiences who bring stereotypical preconceptions about the Middle East to their reading. An excerpt:

These prejudices are an issue with any Arabic literature in translation, but they were most at hand, Talib said, when dealing with Arab women writers and Arab women characters.

“Translating Arab women characters is…extremely fraught. Why? Because if you’re a reader of modern Arabic literature, you know that what happens in modern Arabic literature. People date in modern Arabic literature; people have sex in modern Arabic literature; people drink and take drugs. And a lot of times, you will just translate what you find on the page, and you’ll find that reviewers find this peculiar.”

If a reviewer — who Talib sees as a proxy for the reader — finds an Arab woman not wrapped in ten layers of fabric, forced to marry her cross-eyed cousin, and pushed to the back seat of a car, then, “the reviewer says, ‘What an unrealistic depiction of Arab women.’”

“There is a hostility in the reader’s mind” to characters who don’t fit particular stereotypes, Talib said.

Read the whole thing.