After Babel, The Machine?

Seven figures — six masked, one unmasked. — Six machines, one human.

An experiment in literary translation. Six AI translators rendered the same chapter of Gabriele Tergit’s novel Effingers into English to examine how they compare to the human’s interpretation of the text.

The six machines differed in one way: how each built its translator. One inherited a persona from the human translator’s own writing; one assembled its own from a German corpus; others read more widely, or worked from nothing at all. Each then translated the same chapter under the same constraints, against Sophie Duvernoy’s published translation as the anchor.

Read the full experiment — every version aligned scene by scene →

How far each version pulls toward English — the six machine versions cluster low; the human sits far out beyond them. — How far each pulls toward English. The six machines cluster; the human stands apart.

Set against the German and against each other, the machines crowd into a narrow band; the human sits roughly twice as far over. The version built from the translator’s own writing landed no closer to her than the rest — it took her reading of the author, not her hand on the page.

The seven versions of Chapter 25 aligned scene by scene against the German original. — The seven versions, aligned scene by scene against the German — read them side by side →

Visit

← work