Comments on Carpenter Readings -Jaxon

After reading "Jumping Into the Pond," I couldn't agree more with the idea of "translating the spirit" and "the translator has to understand." I think that's what the machine translation can't do. The machine might be able to process better with a certain amount of contexts, but it can never catch the spirit when translating very similar words like "わくわく" and "どきどき." AI's algorithm uses big data to enhance its ability, such as AI translation's algorithm learned to translate by reading an unimaginative number of literature works. However, just like "娘" is not able to be translated very well in Snow Country,  no matter how good an algorithm is at learning different literature all over the world, a new book can't be well translated just by looking at the works in the past. Machines, after all, don't have any creativity, and they can't really "understand" a book. Machines can summarize the book or even categorize or make comments on the book, but if it's going to the details, they are almost useless. 

I found doing translation actually makes you learn a lot of things, too, as the article described. As a human, we know little about the world, so I think if we are doing translation, learning new things all the time is a fun part of translation. As translators, to be able to understand the book, they definitely need to put a lot more effort into making sure the readers have the minimum cultural barrier to read the work.

It's very interesting to see the collaborations among translators, and in the interview, Carpenter even collaborated with the author herself, which is fascinating. I don't really know if it is common to have multiple translators work on a literature work at the same time. I wonder how exactly they cooperate, do they just work on different parts and check each other's work, or does one of them translate and the other one check and give suggestions? It's hard to imagine that usually, only one person is doing the translation, even if the book is super long. I just realized that making a translation, sometimes, can take longer time than writing the book they are translating.