re/translate

by Stephen Hines

40 pages, Unknown Binding

Published December 28, 2015

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Hosho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally got to crack the spine on this one, and it's a mighty intriguing and curious read -- a poem translated and re-translated by current technology, each iteration saved as is. Watch the language shift, words change, be misinterpreted, and it's impossible not to consider the cross-cultural changes as well. It's especially interesting considering that online translating technologies improve almost daily (and are set to improve drastically over the next decade)...making this book not just a cautionary tale of the limitations of cheapjack translation, but a kind of time capsule snapshot of where the technology was in 2015. I'd suspect it is already interesting to the linguists of the world, but may well become a kind of retro Rosetta Stone of translation code. In any event, it's another publishing curio from America's artisan stalwart Bottle of Smoke Press -- which means it's beautifully made.