9.295 vagueness, tagging, translation, ideal language

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Tue, 14 Nov 1995 18:22:55 -0500 (EST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 295.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Pamela Cohen <pac@rci.rutgers.edu> (12)
Subject: vagueness, ambiguity, translation

[2] From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca> (37)
Subject: dynamic & static tagging

[3] From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca> (14)
Subject: Eco on language

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 09:29:42 -0500
From: Pamela Cohen <pac@rci.rutgers.edu>
Subject: vagueness, ambiguity, translation

A (somewhat) relevant aside to the current "vagueness" thread.

Those interested in this topic may enjoy Banana Yoshimoto's <t>N.P.</t>
(Grove Press, 1994), which is about a Japanese woman who works as a
Japanese-English translator. Although it does not deal with issues of
textual markup, it does provide insight into the poetic nuances, and the
subjective nature of translation, especially when one reads the book, as I
did, as an English translation of the Japanese original.

Pamela Cohen
______________________________________________________________________
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
169 College Avenue / New Brunswick NJ 08903
phone: (908) 932-1384 / fax: (908) 932-1386
pac@rci.rutgers.edu

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 17:59:02 -0500
From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: dynamic & static tagging

Russon Wooldridge, in Humanist 9.292, notes that,

>As other contributors to the discussion have stated, the traditional
>view of computer applications, derived from Western logic and
>mathematics, imposes a need to tag, tag, tag and thus distort the
>text, whether literary or dictionary. Tagging can be helpful for the
>individual researcher, who does it for exploratory purposes (it can
>remain dynamic), but becomes dictatorial when frozen in a
>distributed database (whence the false sense of security given by
>the (arbitrary) field labelling of the dictionary, whether printed
>or electronic).

Unquestionably tagging changes the text -- or should we say creates a
translation of this text from the data? -- but then so does reading it, I
suppose. The telling point is that the tags, if they are regarded as final
or the results simply accepted without thought, become dictatorial. The
fluidity of the text is masked by the authoritative, or authoritarian, form
given it by the tags. As Gary Shawver pointed out, I think, this state of
affairs is not really very different from what editing has always done or
allowed to happen to a text. The difference is that if the tagged text is
provided with all the necessary tools to change the tagging and re-produce
whatever was made from the database, then the fluidity is not hampered, at
least in principle. Or am I deluding myself here? If the text is
sufficiently large -- let us say the size of Dante's Commedia or a later
edition of the TLF -- is the size of the task of re-tagging so great that is
it effectively beyond the pale?

The point I made earlier really hinged on the proposition made some time ago
by Michael Sperberg-McQueen in a fine article in <t>Literary and Linguistic
Computing</t>, that tagging is a mental discipline and way of thinking about
text, not a mindless task best done by hired labour. One hopes that tagging
a text will allow all sorts of useful things to be produced from it, of
course, but these are tentative expressions of the moment, like all
translations.

Like Wooldridge I live for the fuzz, in the fuzz. I guess my way of enjoying
it differs somewhat, however.

WM

Willard McCarty, Centre for Computing in the Humanities
Departments of Classical Studies and Italian Studies (Toronto)
(416) 978-3974 voice (416) 978-6519 fax mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca
http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~mccarty/wlm/

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 18:09:31 -0500
From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Eco on language

The TLS for 5 November, no. 4831, contains a review germane to the current
discussion on vague & fuzzy matters: John A. C. Greppin, "What song the
Sirens sang", of Umberto Eco, <t>The Search for the Perfect Language</t>,
tr. James Fentress (Blackwell). The perfect language is, I suppose, one in
which there is no fuzz, the Adamic speech in which the name of a thing is
its nature. Greppin likes the book, says it is "not a ritual document to be
studied by the cloistered acolytes of the semiotic faith, but rather a
wonderful piece of literature, a book to be read by all with pleasure". If
any Humanist has read this book, I for one would apppreciate comments on it
in particular.

WM

Willard McCarty, Centre for Computing in the Humanities
Departments of Classical Studies and Italian Studies (Toronto)
(416) 978-3974 voice (416) 978-6519 fax mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca
http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~mccarty/wlm/