Lost in Translation

On what gets lost when we stop speaking for ourselves

Before the written word existed, we relied on stories to carry forward tradition, knowledge and culture. We humans are storytellers. Some of the most iconic pieces of modern literature only exist because of carefully memorised stories that were told for centuries before it was possible to write them down. From Homer’s Iliad to Norse mythology, from religious texts to old wives’ tales, these all existed in the brains of the few before they were in print for the many.

For Homer’s epics, scholars have long debated just what we might have lost when we turned them from stories told to written works. So much of our communication happens outside of the words that are said. The best translators not only translate the meaning but they must also (try to) establish the same tone, subtext, humour and even cultural context. This task is near-impossible from some languages, and we can see even larger variations on mediums like poetry where you have intentionally flowery and vague language used. Look at the works of Sun Tzu or Confucius and you will find tens or hundreds of different translations available, each of which changes the meaning completely.

I have good friends who speak to their partners in English in spite of it being the native tongue of neither. Imagine how often issues arise because you can simply not find the word in the language the other can understand, even though it lays in the front of your mind in your mother tongue. I relate to this through my own experience, you can talk to me in English and know me as someone with a rich vocabulary, you can talk to me in Portuguese and speak to me as you might engage with a 12 year old, or in French and you meet me as a teenager.

In the English-speaking world we normalise what we should be grateful for, our ability to speak in our mother tongue most of the time. You don’t appreciate how wonderful your healthy eyes are until something disturbs or gets stuck in them, language has the same ability to shock and contrast.

In the west we rarely discuss the nuance involved in interpreting words between languages as we usually read the output and don’t have to deal with the input. The written English we recognise now only really began around the time of Shakespeare and King James, a mere 400 years ago. If we consider that written literature dates back about 5000 years, then anything in between that gap we still consider relevant (in English) has been translated.

Small details within translations can have seismic impacts, one example is the Bible’s use of the word ‘virgin’ to describe Jesus’ virgin birth. The original Hebrew text used to create the old testament uses the word ‘Almah’ which is what appears in Isaiah 7:14 (the prophecy of Jesus). Almah simply means a young woman—a female of marriageable age. There is no implication of virginity in the original Hebrew, even though the language did have a word for it. Jewish scholars 450 years later translated Almah into Greek, using the word ‘parthenos’ which has a stronger connection with virginity.

After the birth and death of Jesus, early Christians then looked back at the existing Greek translation and said this prophecy was about him. When Jerome later translated the Greek into Latin (around 650 years after the previous translation), he used virgo—virgin—thus making it modern day fact. By the time it reached English as “virgin” in the King James Bible, the word had passed through at least 3 different languages, each step reinforcing an interpretation that wasn’t explicitly in the original text.

A single translator’s word choice in 250 BC, made with no knowledge of Jesus, ended up shaping one of the central doctrines of a religion that didn’t exist yet. The virgin birth of Jesus rests substantially on the prophecy in Isaiah, which doesn’t use the word virgin.

Another biblical example of this is the central focus point of John Steinbeck’s wonderful novel East of Eden. When God speaks to Cain after killing his brother, in the King James version of the Bible he makes a promise that thou shalt rule over him, in the American Standard version he commands do thou rule over it. However, the original text uses the Hebrew word ‘timshel’ which actually translates to ‘thou mayest’. As Steinbeck so wonderfully highlights in the novel, the difference in these translations is human agency, timshel says that we do have the capacity but we also have the choice.

In religion we so often see specific verses used as fact, but we so rarely acknowledge the game of Chinese whispers that led us to their current meaning. Language is something I am deeply interested in; in one sense it is all we really have. I’ve always been proud of my own way with words and my professional career was always deeply reliant on my ability to communicate effectively. Being able to express complex thoughts through simple words is a super power and I have always enjoyed this process.

Late last year I had to deal with lawyers, accountants, property managers and other professionals who were not great at communicating, they sent me ChatGPT written emails and I responded in-kind. I found myself taking the easy route and honestly it made me feel a bit sad. They would send me some complex legal jargon clearly spat out by GPT, I would paste it into the same model, have it explained and then copy its recommended response back. It felt empty but these were not emotionally charged conversations, but they needed to be professional and were a means to an end. I was annoyed at how often ChatGPT would try to censor me from expressing concern, or suggest more formal structures; but it was easy and I didn’t have to think.

I now find myself fighting this same battle regularly, whether to use my brain or to take the easy road. I fear that dealing with ‘work emails’ or ‘lawyers’ becomes a gateway to taking the same easy road when dealing with friends or family. As we begin to use AI more and more for our communications, I fear we become less and less capable of translating the important nuances we need to speak to each other on a human level.

As we communicate through a seemingly infallible translator, we lose our ability to communicate at all. We take suggestions like ‘your message seemed a little too emotionally charged—here is my recommendation’ and we simply hit copy/paste with the belief it will be better than us at communicating to another human being. As we become less capable, we also become less capable of expressing to the translator what we wish to say. The larger the gap that exists between our input (prompt) and our desired outcome, the more space we give AI to misinterpret meaning and take away our voice.

We fight against our very evolution when we shy away from telling stories to seek the comfort of one written for us. When we tell stories, they carry forward the culmination of our past, our unique past. AI models go much further than translating language, they try to translate culture. The current models are trained mostly on one culture which crushes the nuance we would normally portray in our own story. When you send a voice message to a loved one, you usually include things that you wouldn’t if you were to just send a text. Humans are messy and that is what makes us beautiful.

AI becomes a gravitational pull towards a centre of conformity, a single monoculture where the individual shrinks. It is a blackhole of culture and language and context, forfeiting all that makes us unique and interesting is too great a sacrifice for the comfort of reliable text. We play Chinese whispers through machines who don’t care or empathise, and we are surprised when we become less-human.

The typo is rapidly becoming the diamond in the rough as we slowly disintegrate into a plug and play lifestyle. AI is taking over our language and our trust in human output is lowering, to the point where I fear including the em dash—this long dash—into my articles. We recline our chairs and watch the world go by instead of living our life. By the time thoughts are cliff-noted and blindly copy-pasted from our AI powered ghost-writer, the words are two steps removed from what was actually meant. Sometimes we lose track of what we wanted to say because of a new recommended path in how we should say it.

Quoting from Timothy Snyder’s book On Freedom: We speak of “my computer” or “my phone”, but these objects are not ours, any more than the lab belongs to the rat. We speak of our words and our voice, the basic needs for our freedom of expression; but if our words must pass through a moderator before being heard then they are no longer our words, they are moulded and massaged by an invisible hand.

Just as social media connected the world while simultaneously destroying connection, AI threatens to structurally improve our communication while rendering it pointless. Removing the friction in conversation removes the growth that can come with it. We have started to communicate more and more via memes and reels than words as we try to keep pace with a changing world. What I fear is that what remains of our words will be taken away from us as we prioritise comfort over quality. We will send reels to each other and our AI agent will acknowledge them, we will be so fully immersed in optimisation that we lose sight of the beauty in imperfection.

Friction becomes the enemy and in doing so, we lose our ability to tell our stories the way only we are uniquely positioned to tell them. Social media was the shot, AI is the chaser. Just like social media, AI can be a tool to improve our communication with others but it also holds the capacity to destroy it. Be conscious and grateful of your words, be present in conversation and be aware that they are a diminishing currency.