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Article published In:
Literary Translation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Its Future Prospects
Edited by Wang Ning and Wang Hongtao
[Babel 69:4] 2023
► pp. 499–528

Walter Benjamin as translator as John Henry

Competing with the machine

 | Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
The article invokes John Henry’s fatal competition with the rock-driving machine, a legendary exemplar of resistance to automation, as a speculative analogue of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” read as a metaphysical attempt to develop a workable alternative to the kind of mechanizable translating he hated. Benjamin’s practical work with Baudelaire and Proust and the others is read tentatively as the forerunners to machine translation eighty-plus years later – working with the meanings of individual words in sentential chunks, striving to organize them along the lines of statistical usage in the target language, and incrementally learning with each translation job to assimilate actual reproductions of sentential meaning more and more accurately to statistical usage. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” by contrast, read as his anti-MT manifesto, opens up to a somatic phenomenology of felt (super)human life.
Keywords: metaphysics, phenomenology, feeling-tone, Dada, translation chain
Article outline
  • Walter Benjamin as translator as who, now?
  • Walter Benjamin, take one
  • Machine translation, take one
  • Walter Benjamin, take two
  • Machine translation, take two
  • Other paths of most resistance
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00329.rob
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