After Babel Fish: The promise of cheap translations at the speed of the Web
Far from a restrictive act of copying, a translator restores the meaning of a text by means of an elaborate process that requires imagination, ingenuity, and freedom. —Jhumpa Lahiri, “In Praise of Echo” [T]rust is a hard commodity to build, in any interpersonal communication, and all too easy to ruin. No one likes taking another person’s word, and yet in translation, that is literally what the reader is asked to do. —Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor The project of machine translation