Cover not available
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. 564–579

The untranslatability of Literaturnost revisited in the era of artificial intelligence

| Shanghai Jiao Tong University
This paper revisits Roman Jakobson’s literaturnost within the framework of modern poetics and in light of the challenge posed by artificial intelligence to human literary translation. It is argued that literary translation is, in essence, more of a project of code transposition and meaning generation than of message transmission. Furthermore, it is noted that although algorithms can process certain literary devices, they are currently unable to process the polysystemic relations that constitute an artwork’s literaturnost. Consequently, it is emphasized that meaning transferal, meaning generation, and the revolt against meaning will continue to pose barriers for future machine translation even in the long term.
Keywords: Literaturnost , Roman Jakobson, artificial intelligence, machine translation, structural linguistics, poetics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • What is literaturnost?
  • Is literaturnost translatable?
  • The poetics of translation and its algorithmic dilemma
  • Poiesis or mimesis? The meaning barrier of MT and AI
  • Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00333.han
References (32)
References
Barbieri, Marcello. 2002. “Has Biosemiotics Come of Age?” Semiotica 139 (1/4): 283–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 2010. Le lexique de l’auteur: séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études (1973–1974), suivi de fragments inédits du Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes [The author’s lexique: Seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1973–1974), followed by unpublished fragments of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Google Scholar
Brotherston, Gordon. 2005. “Script in Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 211–218. London and New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library.Google Scholar
Cassirer, Ernst. 1944. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Chang, Han-liang 张汉良. 2012. Wenxue de bianjie: yuyan fuhao de kaocha 文学的边界——语言符号的考察 [Boundaries of literature: Explorations in the linguistic sign]. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe.Google Scholar
Codde, Philippe. 2003. “Polysystem Theory Revisited: A New Comparative Introduction.” Poetics Today 24 (1): 91–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dimić, Milan V. 1990. ‘‘Space and Boundaries of Literature According to Russian Formalism, the Prague School, and the Polysystem Theory.’’ In Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema, 30–35. Munich: Iudicum.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Emmeche, Claus. 2001. “Does a Robot Have an Umwelt? Reflections on the Qualitative Biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll.” Semiotica 134 (1/4): 653–693. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erlich, Victor. 1980. Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 4th ed. The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Floridi, Luciano. 2014. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Genzel, Dmitriy, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Franz Och. 2010. “‘Poetic’ Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter.” In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 158–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT, Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Gentzler, Edwin. 2005. “Poetics of Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 167–170. London and New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library.Google Scholar
Han, Lei. 2014. “Juri Lotman’s Autocommunication Model and Roland Barthes’s Representations of Self and Other.” Sign Systems Studies 42 (4): 517–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. “The Idealistic Elements in Modern Semiotic Studies: with Particular Recourse to the Umwelt Theory.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 47 (1): 107–128.Google Scholar
Hendler, James, and Alice M. Mulvehill. 2016. Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity. New York: Apress. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hjelmslev, Louis. 1969. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, translated by Francis J. Whitfield. Madison, Milwaukee, and London: The University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1973. “Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov [Excerpts].” In Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, edited by Edward J. Brown, 58–82. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 1987. Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomoska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Havard University Press.Google Scholar
. 1990. On Language, edited by Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lotman, Yuri. M. 1979. “Culture as Collective Intellect and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence,” translated by Ann Shukman. Russian Poetics in Translation 61: 84–96.Google Scholar
2001. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, translated by Ann Shukman. London, New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Melanie. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning.” Information 10 (2): 51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2020. “On Crashing the Barrier of Meaning in Artificial Intelligence.” AI Magazine 41 (2): 86–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. AI 3.0. [Artificial intelligence: A guide for thinking humans], translated by Feiyue Wang, Yuke Li, Xiao Wang, and Hui Zhang. Chengdu: Sichuan kexue jishu chubanshe.Google Scholar
Poibeau, Thierry. 2019. Jiqi fanyi 机器翻译 [Machine translation], translated by Xiaofeng Lian et al.. Beijing: Jixie gongye chubanshe.Google Scholar
Popovič, Anton. 1976. “Aspects of Metatext.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de littérature comparée 3 (3): 225–235.Google Scholar
Pym, Anthony, and Horst Turk. 2005. “Translatability.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 273–277. London and New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.Google Scholar
Rota, Gian-Carlo. 1986. “In Memoriam of Stan Ulam: The Barrier of Meaning.” Physica 22D1: 1–3.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1982. Theories of the Symbol, translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Tynjanov, Jurij. 1971. “On Literary Evolution,” translated by C. A. Luplow. In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, 66–78. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar