Three Translations from La vallée de l’étrange
by Nicola Danby, Pablo Strauss, and DeepL Translate (AI), translated from J.D. Kurtness
First seen at Salon du livre 2023: Grand Translation Slam in the Age of AI
Translation by Nicola Danby
Zachary’s mother and father make no effort to shelter him from the storm of life. He is a busy child: precocious, gifted, and anxious. His parents do their best to give their only child every opportunity. Even before he was conceived, early in the twenty-first century, his mother carefully monitored her diet, cutting out alcohol, charcuterie, and eggs sunny-side up, just in case she was pregnant and didn’t know it. This would minimize any risk of catching toxoplasmosis or listeriosis. This fetus would have every neuron bright and firing.
His Apgar score was eight in spite of twenty-eight hours of labour. Zachary had baby swim classes, musical awakening, advanced English, hip hop dance, piano, tennis, and taekwondo. Every summer, he chases a soccer ball with the neighbourhood kids in brand-new running shoes.
In spring the boy’s eyes water, in summer his skin bristles with eczema, and every fall he takes a wet cough back to school. His asthma and minor allergies do not kill him, but do make him miserable. His mother slathers him with seasonally appropriate creams: moisturizer or sunscreen, and she dutifully administers his daily doses of Ventolin and antihistamines. A brief episode of psoriasis prickles him through his eleventh winter. The dermatologist explains that stress can trigger this kind of inflammatory disease. The psychologist diagnoses him with somatization of performance anxiety. Neuroses are making their son sick. She gently suggests to the parents that they get off the poor kid’s back. They do. The psoriasis disappears, the allergies ease. They let Zachary play Minecraft for longer, if he eats his vegetables. He won’t grow up to be a doctor or an accountant, but at least he stops scratching.
Just like Skynet, one morning Zachary awakens to an acute self-awareness: it is both paralyzing and absolutely normal. It’s the start of puberty. For the carefree, snivelling child, the veil is lifted on a callous, grey world. His classmates have sleuthed his parents’ social media accounts and uncovered the hundreds of little Zachary pictures they posted: Zachary at Hallowe’en, Zachary at Christmas, Zachary on holiday, Zachary without his two front teeth, Zachary sleeping with his mouth open, Zachary covered in food, Zachary in tears, Zachary on the potty, and even brand new, months-old Zachary, round-cheeked, oddly-shaped, and unrecognizable. These pictures undercut any efforts he makes to build his own profile, which chiefly consist of screenshots of his video game successes. His parents agree to delete all the cringeworthy pictures, but the harm is done. The images have made the rounds, and everyone has seen them. For a few days he is the butt of their jokes, then they move on to their next victim, but it’s enough to put an end to his childhood, and his innocence.
2. Translation by Pablo Strauss
Zachary’s parents did not shield him from the frantic pace of life. Their only son was a busy, precocious, gifted, anxious child, and they did their best to make sure he had every opportunity. Even before he was conceived, in the early twenty-first century, his mother watched her diet. On the off chance she was already pregnant, she cut out alcohol, cold meats, and fried eggs to minimize the risk of toxoplasmosis and listeriosis. This fetus would be born with all its brain cells intact.
The newborn’s Apgar score was a healthy eight, even after twenty-eight hours of labour. Young Zachary did all the classes—baby swimming, music appreciation, advanced English, hip hop, piano, tennis, Tae Kwon Do. His summers were spent with the neighbourhood kids, chasing after a soccer ball in new running shoes.
Zachary got the sniffles in spring and hives in summer, and brought a wet cough home from school every fall. He had asthma and minor allergies that caused discomfort but posed no real threat. His mother slathered him with moisturizer or sunscreen, and made sure he took his daily Ventolin and antihistamines. One winter, age eleven, there was a short-lived episode of psoriasis. The dermatologist explained that stress is a trigger for respiratory problems. The psychologist found that Zachary’s symptoms were the somatic expression of performance anxiety: the parents’ neuroses were making their son unwell. She gently suggested that they leave the kid alone a bit more, and they did. The psoriasis cleared up, the allergies eased. Zachary’s parents let him spend more time playing Minecraft, as long as he ate his vegetables. He might not grow up to be a doctor or an actuary, but at least he stopped itching.
Like Skynet in the Terminator movies, Zachary woke up one day with a heightened self-awareness that was at once paralyzing and perfectly normal: puberty had come for him. The carefree, whiny boy entered a new world that was dreary and cruel.
One day Zachary’s classmates found his parents’ social media accounts. Hundreds of childhood photos made the rounds. There was Zachary at Halloween, Zachary at Christmas, Zachary on vacation. Zachary missing his front teeth, slumbering with his mouth open, with food all over his face or tears in his eyes, sitting on the potty; even chubby-cheeked, disproportioned baby Zachary at just a few months old. These photos obviated all the work he had put into constructing his own profile, mostly screencaps of his gaming prowess. His parents agreed to delete the embarrassing photos, but the damage was done. The pictures were out there, and everyone had seen them. He was the laughingstock of his class for a few days before the kids found someone else to pick on. It was long enough to mark the end of his childhood, and his innocence.
3. Translation by DeepL Translate (AI)
Zachary’s parents don’t spare him from the whirlwind of life. He is a busy, precocious, gifted, and anxious child. The couple did their best to give their only son every chance. Even before he was conceived at the beginning of the twenty-first century, his mother kept a close eye on his diet: she cut out alcohol, cold meats, and fried eggs, just in case she was unknowingly pregnant, to minimize the risk of catching toxoplasmosis or listeriosis. This fetus will have all its neurons intact.
The result of his Apgar test is eight despite twenty-eight hours of work. Zachary takes lessons in baby swimming, music awareness, advanced English, hip hop dance, piano, tennis, and taekwondo. Every summer, he chases a soccer ball with the other kids in the neighbourhood, wearing brand-new running shoes.
The child cries in the spring, develops hives in the summer and a hacking cough every time he goes back to school in the autumn. He suffers from asthma and minor allergies that spoil his life without threatening it. His mother slathers him with moisturizer or sun cream, depending on the season, and forces him to take his daily doses of Ventolin and antihistamines. He suffered a brief bout of psoriasis in the winter when he was eleven. The dermatologist explained to the parents that stress could be a trigger for this type of inflammatory disease. The psychologist diagnoses somatization of performance anxiety. Their neuroses are making their son ill. She subtly advises the parents to leave him alone, which they do. The psoriasis disappeared, the allergies diminished. They let Zachary play Minecraft for longer as long as he eats his vegetables. He probably won’t become a doctor or an actuary, but he stops scratching.
Like Skynet, Zachary wakes up one morning with an acute, paralyzing and ordinary sense of self: puberty has begun. The carefree, whiny child that he was discovers a grey, unforgiving world. His classmates have unearthed the profiles of his parents on social networks and the hundreds of photos they’ve posted of Zachary as a child: Zachary on Halloween, Zachary at Christmas, Zachary on holiday, Zachary with no front teeth, Zachary asleep with his mouth open, Zachary covered in food, Zachary crying, Zachary on the potty and even the chubby, deformed and unrecognizable Zachary of the first few months of his life. These photos cancel out all the effort he has put into building his own profile, consisting mainly of screenshots of his video game successes. His parents agreed to delete all the humiliating photos, but the damage was done. They were circulating and everyone had seen them. He was laughed at for only a few days before moving on to another victim, but it was enough to sound the death knell of his childhood and innocence.
Pablo Strauss: Love and Obstacles: Translation in the Age of AI
1. Salon
I was invited to take part in an event at the Salon du livre de Montréal¹ comparing the work of four human translators and one translation engine, DeepL. The two novels translated were J.D. Kurtness’s Vallée de l’étrange and Sean Michaels’s Do You Remember Being Born. Both engage with artificial and human intelligence from a place of curiosity. In total, six texts were produced, in English and French, and the English pieces are published above. Each human translation speaks in a different voice. But our discussion was short, so I would like to share a few thoughts here on artificial intelligence (AI) and translation.
2. Object-Oriented
J.D. Kurtness’s speculative novel describes the techniques used by a programmer to teach robots to convincingly emulate human emotion. Humans become so attached to their “companions” that when the authorities forcibly remove their companions, their “masters” resist. The scenario is plausible because, as Kurtness writes, human beings have always been “been as attached to our objects as to living things, so long as they identify with them.”
In the hands of an author who studied natural and computer science while writing novels that delight in the blurred bounds of nature, humanity, and technology, the intersection of human and object, mediated by code, is a fascinating and funny place. Kurtness explores not only the technology’s potential but also the accidents and unintended consequences it will bring. Once we have given our inventions a life of their own, where will they end up?
Sean Michaels’s novel tells the story of a celebrated poet, Marian Ffarmer, hired by a tech company to write a poem in collaboration with a custom-built AI. Here the parallels with translation are more explicit; I want to note two.
In Michaels’s novel, Marian is placed to work in “a room without surprises, designed for steady productive flow, absent all the accidents that made real life so beautiful and frustrating and frequently unremunerative.” She struggles to write under these conditions. This rings true: much as AI engines are fed on vast corpora of literature, we human translators are nourished by our readings and environments. We too are intelligences, gathering stimuli. But we are also human beings, with bodies and organs. Our memories are poor, but our senses are rich. As an artist’s studio is an art-making environment, almost a machine, so too are my desk and office a part of my practice, a stimulating space open to randomness that alters my mood and makes it possible to read closely and write freely. I, for one, need music playing through an old stereo with coloured incandescent lamps, between sunlit walls and sprawling plants, an old chair and a floor bearing the patina of generations who laboured here before me. The room shapes the thought, or in Michaels’s words, “art is inscribed by the place from which it comes.”
As the clock ticks down, Marian approaches an impasse in her collaboration. She goes to an event where she meets a young poet and, in violation of the agreed-upon rules, invites her into the process. Where a carefully planned set of predetermined constraints mediated by technology fails, an unplanned human dialogue produces the platonic sparks that are the beginning of a real work of art.
Translators see everything as metaphor for process, and this scene is no exception. In our work, once we have pushed our texts to the limits of our own abilities—a laborious feat of endurance—we must bring in friends and colleagues, authors and readers and editors. Other human intelligences working in different rooms and under different lighting will see problems and solutions we missed. We must be ready to listen to and learn from them. I have seen time and again that the very best translations come about through a series of generous human interactions.
3. AI
In the past, our notion of what translation is—I mean all translation, from novels to ads to legal contracts—has focused on knowing multiple languages and looking up words and phrases. So too did the practice; we’d spend hours to get to a point of just understanding and rendering the meaning of a text. Much of our time was spent researching the most common ways of saying things, one phrase at a time.
AI now does most of these steps for an entire text, hundreds of thousands of the same operations we manually perform, instantly and relatively well. The result is not perfect, but anyone who has watched the technology evolve will be most impressed by how fast it is learning. It is still easy to find errors and poke holes. But I don’t hear a lot of translators laughing at machine translation the way we did ten years ago. Instead we are afraid, for good reason, that it will steal our tricks and take our jobs. Many commercial translators have already left the profession. The rest of us now use AI, in big and small ways that we soon cease to notice. Others insist on one facet of the job or another that machines will “never” do, but I have seen so many of these come to pass that I don’t say “never” anymore.
As a freelancer, I wake up every day and wonder if new work will come. I also wonder what else I can do, if it comes to that. But I do not want to do anything else. To quote Rebecca Solnit:
I’m a writer because I want to write. I don’t want a machine to do it for me … what is the point of handing over the job of understanding something more deeply, seeing the pattern that underlies? Why would I want to give up that profound experience?
It is not just us translators; all of us whose work is disembodied may one day have to find new things to do. Until I do, I tell myself that I’ll keep translating because I want to, in the way that a silkworm produces silk, until the last job disappears.
4. Obstacles
Fear makes us want a simple paradigm: AI = Bad/Human translation = good. Let’s be honest, though: most human translation is lacklustre. Too often we can’t find the time or summon the motivation to go to the great lengths it takes. Our collaborators are unwilling, our deadlines unreasonable, our budgets inadequate. When we fail to care deeply about each word and punctuation mark, the result is at best “good enough.” It lacks vigour and spark. And let’s be honest: this too is human.
When I read uninspired translations, I can often feel the constraints holding them back. Most often, one simple idea: “I can’t do that.” How can we place ourselves in a space free enough to come up with a text as comfortable in its skin as the original? I have no answer, but a starting point: “You can do anything.” With this freedom comes a responsibility to see it through, to go to whatever lengths it takes.
Sometimes the best translation for a word is its opposite (unemployment for employment). Sometimes the best translation is nothing, a cut. A French phrase like “c'est-à-dire” can become a colon, setting us up to expand or amplify. Paragraphs, sentences, jokes—all follow different conventions in different languages, and we must let these differences be.
And we must let our intelligence roam freely through our world, unconstrained by rules; we must let the outside world in.
While translating my Kurtness sample I was also rereading Jane Eyre, the sort of book I enjoy as a break from work. I was struck by how often Charlotte Brontë uses the word dreary. A personal preference, or just the English weather? Either way, when I looked up grey in the thesaurus and saw dreary, it was a sign. I had to use it. (Later, I might have to remove it.) But being open to the signs around us, in our reading and the physical world, is a first step toward a text that is free and alive (one might say human). “My problem with most books is that they are not free,” writes Marguerite Duras. That is also my problem with many translations.
5. Love
It may sound like I am advocating recklessness and randomness. And it’s true that my first drafts are chaotic. But then I do many more. Three or four alongside the original, and then two or three away from it, to let the text breathe, let it be. These are followed by another two or three, with the French again, to rein it in where I have gone too far. Most drafts are on the screen but some are on paper. Some proceed backwards. Some I listen to text-to-speech. Afterwards, I will query my author, and seek out and listen to editors.
My point is that rigor does not equal logic, does not mean following rules. In an iterative art like ours, there is no limit to the number of times we can rework our materials.
Here let us listen to Lori Saint-Martin, an eminent Canadian translator who passed away in 2022 but lives on in some 130 translations into French, many with her husband Paul Gagné. In Sherry Simon’s tribute in the magazine Spirale², we find a phrase of Saint-Martin’s that I will hold onto, “s’éloigner pour mieux se tenir au plus près” (“stepping away to get closer”), translation as an act of not merely close reading but what she calls “amoureuse attention” (“loving attention”).
Is there a better description of human intelligence? Avoiding AI will not take us there, any more than using it will. It is our work as translators to create the conditions for this loving attention.
6. Keyboards
For years, I started every workday listening to Glenn Gould play Bach. Lately it has been Bill Evans, Alone. The piano is not my favourite instrument, but the sound of two hands on its keys gets me going as I drink coffee and get my mind turning. I feel a kinship, a desire to play my own instrument, which is also a keyboard, with the assurance of a pianist.
I don’t know if we are truly in a war, and whether the AI will win in the end. But until it does I’ll be here at my desk tapping the keys, because it’s what I love to do and because it makes me feel human.
¹ Nicola Danby and Pablo Strauss produced English versions of a passage from J.D. Kurtness’s La vallée de l’étrange (L’instant même, 2023), and a machine-translated version was produced using DeepL. Working into French, Catherine Ego and Éric Fontaine translated a passage from Sean Michaels’s Do You Remember Being Born (Random House Canada, 2023), and a DeepL version was produced as well.
² Spirale 284.
Photos by Pablo Strauss.
ABOUT THE CREATORs
Nicola Danby is a French-English translator with an BA (hons) in Traduction et Stylistique from McGill University and an MA in Translation from York University. One of her earliest memories is her father teaching her to write the letter e in front of the fire. In love with language ever since, she is now a translator and revisor at Hydro-Québec and is the Translation Editor at carte blanche, and was on the Translation Jury for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Awards. She lives in Montreal with her husband and two boys, and their two guinea pigs.
Pablo Strauss grew up in Victoria, BC, and has lived in Quebec City for twenty years. He has translated over ten works of Quebec fiction, several graphic novels, and the screenplay of one feature film. He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Award for translation. Website: pablostrausstranslation.com
A native of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, J.D. Kurtness moved to Montreal to study microbes, but branched out into literature and computer science. She has published a dozen short stories and three novels: Of Vengeance (2019) (De vengeance, 2017), Aquariums (2022) (in French: Aquariums, 2019), and La vallée de l’étrange (2023). At once scientific and humanistic, her writing explores our relationship with technology and the land. The work of this Innu author has been translated into English and German and will soon be available in Arabic.