Not only that, but this second wave in reading can also bring down cultural barriers, like language itself. In the ultimate imagining of ebooks, it will be possible for one book to be rendered into many languages automatically. Likewise, all the comments will be automatically translated into the same language, allowing you and someone in Egypt or Spain to converse as book lovers while reading the same book, without worrying about language barriers.
But we need good language-translation services first.
Globally, there are about 6,900 living languages and at least that many unique ways of seeing the world.
Languages are puzzle boxes. What we do when we speak expresses only a hundredth of what we actually think. We leap from idea to idea with barely a thought, but we only express one idea of the many we conceive. That’s what makes conversations so much fun, and books too. They are all about translating, interpreting, discovering, and creating meanings from these puzzle boxes.
The difference is that languages aren’t antiques, like dusty, inlaid Chinese boxes with sliding panels. They’re made fresh every minute with every new utterance and usage, and they have to be deciphered anew at every sentence. So much is unsaid in a sentence that it has to be puzzled out and reconstructed. The process can often go awry, maybe because the speaker was joking, or using puns or double entendres, or perhaps because the listener misinterpreted what he or she read or heard.
Given all that can go wrong in communicating a sentence, let alone an entire book, it’s a wonder that books are translated at all.
And in fact, no translation is perfect. Any skilled translator will perform a deep reading of the book and try to interpret it before rewriting it anew. Inevitably, though—and this is part of the charm of translations—different nuances are brought to bear on the final translation because each translator interprets the book differently. Each translator implicitly refracts the book’s meaning through the crystal of his or her own life.
Some translations are more widely read than the originals and have a greater cultural impact. For example, between 1604 and 1611, the original Bible was translated into the English common at the time of Shakespeare. Named the King James Bible, after the then-current king of England, it abounds with terms we still use—turns of phrase such as “a broken heart” or “a drop in the bucket” or even “bite the dust” —but these, of course, never appeared as such in the original Greek and Latin.
This version of the Bible influenced writers from John Milton to William Faulkner. The text of the King James Bible was carefully crafted word by word by a committee of unpaid but highly devoted scholars who worked on this as a “labor of love.” They were men who perhaps never “saw eye to eye” but who “went the extra mile” to phrase the Bible in simple, easygoing speech.
But we’re in a digital world now. Since 2009, more books have been self-published every year than published by traditional publishers. In 2011 alone, almost 150,000 new self-published books glutted the marketplace, according to Bowker, a U.S. book trade organization. This is far more books than can conceivably be translated by humans. We shouldn’t have to rely on translators, right? Perhaps we’re sophisticated enough now that this can be automated and done digitally.
Google, for example, already offers a way to translate a given ebook into the language of your choice. I wanted to see how accurate automatic book-translation could be, so as an experiment, I took a paragraph from this chapter and used Google’s translator service to render it into another language (say, Chinese) and then re-translate it back into English. For example, when I translated “Languages are puzzle boxes” into Chinese and back to English, I got “Languages are mystery boxes, old conundrum boxes.” To determine the success rate, I took the number of correct words and subtracted it from the total number of words, and then divided by two, since we’re translating twice.
I tested a few different languages this way. Scores ranged from 83 percent for German to 65 percent for Japanese and averaged around 75 percent fidelity to the original text. A cynic would argue that this only proves my writing is more German than Japanese. But I would interpret this to mean that, on average, three-quarters of a given book of similar complexity to my own could be translated reasonably well into any language.
What’s the threshold for automatic translation? Apple’s virtual assistant Siri seems to have a success rate of 86 percent, and people are still complaining, so clearly, we have a few more years to wait before automated ebook translation happens and we’re able to achieve the global vision of reading that I described above. Even though they’re offered as part of Google’s ebook reading experience, automatic translations just aren’t good enough yet. But soon, perhaps in the “twinkling of an eye,” automatic translations will be good enough to read—but never as good, I think, as those from a skilled human translator.
Of course, the great thing about the future is that we can’t predict it. Perhaps an ebook innovator like Google will build a new Tower of Babel, but in reverse, reconstructing it from its rubble across all cultures. It’s ironic that the new Tower of Babel might be raised from the squat, windowless concrete building that holds Google’s cloud. Google is well poised to do this with its translation software and expertise.
Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that Google can rebuild the Tower of Babel from rubble, one captcha at a time? (Captchas are those forms you fill out on websites when you have to verify your identity. They usually have a smudged word or two for you to type in.) Most of the captchas you see on the internet are from Google. They’re how Google fixes conversion errors in their ebook content. Every time you verify yourself on a website, you’re helping Google to decipher one or two words in one of millions of their books.
As a technologist, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to automatically decipher any book fairly well. I think that is stunning, because it opens up a whole new set of authors for me to read! These are authors who aren’t commercially important enough for publishers to translate themselves but authors that I would like to read, nonetheless.
Bookmark: Dictionaries
Dictionaries, as we know them, are static snapshots of a culture at an instant in time, defined by a bunch of old men in an ivory tower in Oxfordshire, England. This ivory tower is crumbling, though, and is being replaced by sites like Wordnik and UrbanDictionary.
In my experience, CEOs of companies are often spreadsheet-blooded, boorish, bottom-line businessmen. But company founders are often warm and soulful. They’re people like Erin, the founder of Wordnik. She’s so sweet that I wonder if she’s ever had a negative thought in her life. There’s a little red heart on her business card, for heaven’s sake.
The former editor of Oxford’s dictionaries, Erin started her company to create contextual dictionaries, to scour the web and books and magazines for words and assemble what those words really mean in context, using clues from the content.
Current e-readers—and some enhanced ebooks—often include a dictionary to help you look up words, which is awesome. It’s a feature I miss when I’m reading printed books. These days, I often find myself wanting to tap the physical page to select a word and see its meaning.
Having a dictionary built into my e-reader is great, and dictionaries will only get more exciting over time. That’s right. You heard me: dictionaries will become downright exciting! You’ll be able to bring out the culture’s intent as you read with these new internet-enabled dictionaries and encyclopedias, ones that are germane to the book you’re reading.