- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Those who hope to use the translator to give their love life an international flavor may want to proceed with some caution. The classic pick-up line "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" loses a little of its impact after taking a detour through the Italian language: "Which thing an pleasant girl as you it is making in a place like this?" And I don't imagine you'd get very far with "Did no matter who ever indicate you that you could be a model?" or the more straightforward "You are a hot breast! You are flavorful pies!" (Of course, the original English here -- "You're a hot mama! You're one tasty pastry!" -- might be no more effective.)

Still, while the translations rarely enhance well-chosen words of love, they might still prove serviceable for initiating more straightforward interactions. "Hello, sailor" loses little in the translation. And though neither "Search of the good time?" or "How much is a job of the blow?" are 100 percent accurate translations from the Italian, it's not likely anyone will wholly miss their meanings.

The Translation Assistant seems to have the biggest trouble keeping track of pronouns -- it's constantly transforming "hes" and "shes" into "its," "yous" into "theys" and so on. "Show me the money," translated into Portuguese and back, becomes, "He shows the money to me." Bart Simpson's "Don't have a cow, man," becomes, "It does not have a cow, man."

But if AltaVista's magic translation machine doesn't always deliver up linguistic perfection, the translator does give English speakers a glimpse into what all those foreigners out there are saying behind our backs. And it may help us to understand some of the most puzzling mysteries of the global village: why Germans love David Hasselhoff more than "blond chest swimmer" Pamela Anderson Lee, and why French people think Jerry Lewis is l'explosif.

So far, my excursions into the German Web haven't exactly clarified the appeal of "the man, who speaks with the auto." But I've had more luck with Mr. Lewis. Doing a search for pages in French devoted to the limber-limbed comedian, I quickly discovered a wealth of material, including a lengthy and serious academic exegesis of Lewis' burlesque genius.

And I was, for a moment, almost persuaded that "The Disorderly Orderly" deserves a second look. Even the stupidest slapstick, infused with the French spirit, takes on a certain grandeur. "Unsuited eternal, unceasingly maltreated or exploited, [Lewis] has for only defense only his own maladjustment: let us reproach him his awkwardness, it becomes more destroying, try to make it conceal so that he howls of more beautiful," one earnest Lewisite explained, his passion only partially dimmed by the inevitable mistakes in the automatic translation. "Its innocence is not inoffensive, its maladjustment has something of triumphing: that an object resists to him, it will come to end by the destruction, that an enemy threatens it, it will overcome it by the exasperation."

That sounds about right. And what of the legendary Martin/Lewis combo? Our French expert captures its essence in a single sentence: "Dean Martin, crooner phlegmatic and cynical undergoes the jokes to which delivers itself Jerry Lewis, little runt howling ... and persecutes it in return."

Could any native English speaker have put it any better? I think not. The strangest thing about the AltaVista translation is that the ones that are not too awfully bungled often seem not to have lost, but to have gained from the translation. A routine descriptive sentence from an alt.sex story becomes: "He entered easily, she was ready, virtually cooking to the steam inside."

The AltaVista Translation Assistant gives us all a glimpse into a world beyond English -- and, perhaps even more importantly, can give non-English speakers access to the 70 percent of the Web that's in English. But it can teach us something even more fundamental about the art of communication.

The Translation Assistant, with its stubborn literalness, forces us to look again at the roots of our own language. Most of the time, we skate across its surface, building our sentences not from individual words but from ready-made blocks of words -- common phrases, simple noun-verb combinations, clichés. Our speech, in short, is prefab. The translator, not understanding our clichés, puts words together in its own original way -- and thus is able to infuse the most banal of utterances with a certain poetry. As the Translation Assistant itself might put it: That's some flavorful pies!
SALON | March 3, 1998

David Futrelle writes regularly for Salon. You can find links to his work here.