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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 455.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
Hosted by King's Digital Lab
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.450: failure of another sort: the intention? (91)
[2] From: Alec McAllister
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal to reveal (48)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-12-02 16:16:46+00:00
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.450: failure of another sort: the intention?
Herbert
Alas it is all assumption. No evidence of intention. But I like the story
nonetheless. It opens up consideration of a whole genre of poetry.
As to translation from the Arabic to English, perhaps a subscriber to
Humanist can oblige. My friend prefers to dwell in the enigma.
Francois
> Date: 2019-11-30 21:55:02+00:00
> From: Dr. Herbert Wender
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal
> to reveal
>
> Francois,
>
> is there any evidence, in the text or elsewhere, that the intention behind
> the
> usage of such 'enforced' mirror writing is directed against machine
> reading?
> Maybe this sort of resistance is only a collateral good while the 'true'
> intent
> was the enigmatic appearance of the verses? (I suppose that the lines are
> meant
> as verses, and I would have appreciated a litera translation by vour
> friend...)
>
> Herbert
________________________________
From: Humanist
Sent: 30 November 2019 09:52
To: publish-liv@humanist.cch.kcl.ac.uk
Subject: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal to reveal
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 447.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
Hosted by King's Digital Lab
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2019-11-29 14:29:34+00:00
From: Francois Lachance
Subject: Failure of Another Sort
Willard
I have come across an interesting and quirky case...
Maged Zaher _the consequences of my body_
Failure of another sort - engineered failure for the monolingual English
reader - you turn the page in Zaher's book and on the verso is this
section of what looks like Arabic. No translation, no annotation.
I turned to an Arab-speaking friend who informs me:
[quote]
Typically, one has to understand what one is reading in Arabic and do so
with a good grasp of the grammar in order to read it correctly. This is
one reason why the language is classified as one of the most difficult in
the world.
Your poet is intentionally trying to make things even more difficult. The
Arabic script is in mirror image. And, to complicate things further, it is
all in upper case letters without any spaces separating the words.
I am assuming the intention here is to have the text resist optical
recognition software and hence make it accessible only to a living
breathing Arabic reading human.
[/quote]
In this case the machine is to aid communication, connecting with the
human, by resisting the machine.
--
Francois Lachance
Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
https://berneval.hcommons.org
Attachments:
zaher-consequences.jpg: https://dhhumanist.org/att/81835/att00/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-12-02 14:45:16+00:00
From: Alec McAllister
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal to reveal
I can think of another explanation: plain old software/human error.
Arabic is written right-to-left, but not all software "knows" this, and even
some software that can handle RtoL text needs to be explicitly "told" which bits
are RtoL: if the options are wrongly set, the software displays Arabic as if it
were plain vanilla left-to-right text.
A further complication is that Arabic is written cursively: letters join
together, as in handwriting. Arabic script has no concept of upper and lower
case as such, but each letter can have different forms (typically up to four
different forms, plus certain ligatures, some of them compulsory), depending on
whether the letter is linked to the letter on the right, on the left, to both or
to neither. The software needs to know about this system too, so that it can
substitute the correct forms, taking account of the context.
These days, much this information is already encoded within the font itself, and
the rest is handled pretty routinely by the operating system. From the user's
point of view, s/he starts typing in Arabic and it all just happens.
However, older software, especially fonts, may date from the bad old days when
RtoL scripts needed separate RtoL operating systems. Such software lacks the
features that tell modern, bi-directional operating systems how to handle Arabic
letters.
In extreme cases, Arabic text comes out running from left to right, and with
every letter in its independent (stand-alone) form. In that form, it is
extremely difficult to decipher, even by fluent Arabic readers.
This is especially likely to happen *after* the text has been proof-read and
accepted, and is then handed over to a non-Arabic-speaking graphic-design person
who substitutes a different font because it "looks nicer".
A similar case occurred in the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18911599
[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/media/images/61692000/jpg/_61692786_chrisdoy
le.jpg] Olympics train poster 'gibberish'
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18911599)
A train company is criticised for producing an Olympics security poster which
reads as "gibberish" in Arabic.
www.bbc.co.uk
To err is human, but to make a real mess, use a computer.
Alec McAllister
Multilingual Computing Co-ordinator (retd)
University of Leeds
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