Translators in Space

My first blog post!

Went to see the film Arrival the other day and was predictably gratified by the centrality of a linguist/translator. A pretty good film, but if emotional violin music and soft-focus footage of babies make you cry, be prepared to exit the theater wiping your eyes and sniffling, to the alarm of those cinema-goers waiting to replace you.

After leaving Arrival and drying my face, I thought about other stories featuring communication between humans and aliens. There happen to be three on my shelf, so I’m going to review all three, and here’s the first:

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn

A spaceship crashes in the forest near a small German village in 1348. The aliens inside are essentially large, highly evolved grasshoppers. Some are technicians, some scientific explorers, others tourists, and they are lost. The villagers are a lovable lot who are just dying to demonstrate to you, the reader, that the Middle Ages were not nearly as bad as everyone likes to think.  The parish priest, in particular, is really a super nice guy and – importantly for someone about to make first contact with an advanced alien race – superbly well-educated for a random pastor in the sticks.

By the time Dietrich, the priest, gets a chance to converse with them, the aliens have already developed a translation program. It turns out they have been sneaking into the village to plant audio/visual bugs in strategic locations so their translation software can record and analyze the villagers’ speech.

The little speaker box they use as an interpreter is, at least for me, the most delightful thing in this book. Dietrich initially believes it contains a brownie or sprite (a “Heinzelmännchen”), and although the aliens explain that “There is no small man. The box himself speaks,” the name sticks.

As one would expect from the circumstances, the Heinzelmännchen communicates imperfectly. Dietrich has to help fill in gaps in its vocabulary. Its lack of intonation means questions often end in  ” – question”. Its phrasing is awkward and marked by literal translations from German into English. It doesn’t “translate”, it “oversets” (übersetzen); it says “Greet God” (Grüß Gott) for hello and “it gives” (es gibt) for “there is”; it asks “What means ‘tongue’?” instead of “What does tongue mean?”

If you think about this too hard it will start to blow your mind because the phrasing that makes the machine sound a little off is actually correct in the language the machine is supposedly translating into. But somehow it works. I think Flynn’s decision here is designed to give us two impressions: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in Germany!  German words and phrases also pepper the speech of the human characters, but in such a way that it feels more like local color than awkwardness. I don’t think Eifelheim has been translated into German, but anyone who tried would find it a challenge to reproduce these effects. My suggestion would be to hit the Middle High German textbooks and find some obsolete grammar and syntax for the machine to use (and some quaint phrases for the humans). This would give readers the impression that: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in the Middle Ages! Which is probably about the best you can do.

The book also explores the larger problems of communication between creatures with different cultures and technology. “The fluid that drives our ship jumped in an unexpected manner and ran down the wrong mill race,” says one alien. “Certain items burned. Ach! I do not have the words to say it; nor you the words to hear.” The aliens are not sure what to make of Dietrich’s pronouncements at the intersection of philosophy, theology and science. To his speculation about whether there is “a fifth element through which the stars move,” or whether “heavenly motions can be explained by the same elements we find in the sublunar regions,” the alien can only respond, “You are either very wise, or very ignorant.” The humans talk eagerly of Jesus Christ, the lord who came from the sky, took their form, and taught them things, and will return someday – does this mean he is an incredibly advanced alien, a being of pure energy who knows the art of inhabiting a foreign body? If so, wonder the stranded grasshoppers, could he save them? He can save anyone, say the humans, but what exactly does that mean? And inquiries about when precisely he is coming back are answered with frustrating vagueness. True mutual understanding requires much more than grammar and vocabulary.

Eifelheim hits a sweet spot for anyone who likes German, translation, medieval history, philosophy, Catholicism, and science fiction (in other words, me), but you needn’t be a specialist in any of these to enjoy it. A well-researched, funny, touching, and ultimately heartbreaking adventure, it deserves to be more widely known.