Updated—Spare A Idea For The Translators At The U.S./N. Korea Summit

Update: Ah crap. I typed the headline thinking "Yeah, that sounds good."
No wonder, one-half of it was at TIME magazine this morning:

Translating Trump too Kim: Spare a Thought for the Interpreters at the June 12 Summit

Inadvertent but a telling comment on my consummate lack of creativity.

Original post:
Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 few hours from now.
From the Daily Beast, March 24:

If Trump Calls Kim Jong Un Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 ‘Fat Toad,’ His Interpreter Will Have to Translate It

There volition hold upwards at to the lowest degree ii other people inwards the room for this historic summit. And the weight of the Blue Planet is on their every word.

When Donald Trump meets amongst Kim Jong Un sometime in the side yesteryear side ii months, in that location is a non-zero run a risk that the high-stakes nuclear summit descends into rounds of school-yard taunting.

Should Trump telephone telephone Kim “fat” too should Kim reply yesteryear calling Trump a “dotard”—as each, remarkably, has done inwards the past—it volition autumn on their respective interpreters to deliver those broadsides inwards the other’s dialect. And though doing so mightiness precipitate a nuclear holocaust, in that location is cypher that tin hold upwards done well-nigh it. The words volition hold upwards translated.

“Yes, of course,” said Dimitry Zarechnak, who served equally Ronald Reagan’s interpreter during his summit amongst sometime Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when asked if Trump’s interpreter would create got to enjoin Kim that the president called him “little Rocket man.”

The discussions surrounding a potential Trump-Kim summit is already fairly volatile.

The president agreed to the coming together on a whim. But equally of late equally this yesteryear Thursday, he signalled his displeasure at having to snuff it through amongst it at all. “This should create got been done yesteryear somebody earlier they were inwards the topographic point that they’re inwards correct now,” he said at a White House event.

It’s non alone clear if Trump will, inwards fact, snuff it through amongst it. His sometime overstep adviser, Steve Bannon, has expressed his belief that it volition hold upwards logistically impossible to line off. And the appointment of sometime United Nations Ambassador John Bolton—a human who seems to a greater extent than disposed to preemptively bombing Democratic People's South Korea too so talking amongst its leaders—as the novel national safety adviser makes the likelihood of a summit fifty-fifty to a greater extent than remote.

But should it transpire, i of the to a greater extent than critical responsibilities volition autumn on the interpreters. The role that they play inwards presidential tete-a-tetes is oft overlooked, if non alone ignored. And for skillful reason. The interpreter is, at his or her most basic level, a oratorical tool for a conversation betwixt other individuals. They are accessories, non players.

But they don’t simply robotically interpret words either (indeed, they scoff at beingness called “translators” equally opposed to “interpreters”). Often, indeed, their project involves a fair amount of intuition, study, too diplomacy.  Those tasks larn exceptionally to a greater extent than hard at a summit amongst Blue Planet leaders. For the i laid to laissez passer on betwixt Trump too Kim, the hurdles are fifty-fifty higher, do to the enigmatic nature of both leaders too the existential nature of the talk....MORE

Related:

Nov. 2016
Don't Swear at Nuns too Other Stories of Translation, Human too Machine 
From Aeon:

Shitloads too zingers: on the perils of motorcar translation
Years ago, on a flying from Amsterdam to Boston, ii American nuns seated to my correct listened to a voluble immature Dutchman who was out to detect the United States. He asked the nuns where they were from. Alas, Framingham, Massachusetts was non on his itinerary, but, he noted, he had ‘shitloads of fourth dimension too would hold upwards visiting shitloads of other places’.

The jovial immature Dutchman had manifestly gathered that ‘shitloads’ was a colourful synonym for the bland ‘lots’. He had mastered the syntax of English linguistic communication too a rather extensive vocabulary but lacked sense of the appropriateness of words to social contexts.

This retentiveness sprang to hear amongst the recent news that the Google Translate engine would movement from a phrase-based organization to a neural network. (The technical differences are described here.) Both methods rely on grooming the motorcar amongst a ‘corpus’ consisting of judgement pairs: an original too a translation. The figurer too so generates rules for inferring, based on the sequence of words inwards the original text, the most probable sequence of words from the target language.

The physical care for is an practise inwards designing matching. Similar pattern-matching algorithms are used to interpret the syllables yous utter when yous inquire your smartphone to ‘navigate to Brookline’ or when a photograph app tags your friend’s face. The motorcar doesn’t ‘understand’ faces or destinations; it reduces them to vectors of numbers, too processes them.

I am a professional person translator, having translated to a greater extent than or less 125 books from the French. One mightiness thus aspect me to bristle at Google’s claim that its novel translation engine is almost equally skillful equally a human translator, scoring 5.0 on a scale of 0 to 6, whereas humans average 5.1. But I’m also a PhD inwards mathematics who has developed software that ‘reads’ European newspapers inwards 4 languages too categorises the results yesteryear topic. So, rather than hold upwards defensive well-nigh the possibility of beingness replaced yesteryear a motorcar translator, I am aware of the remarkable feats of which machines are capable, too total of admiration for the technical complexity too virtuosity of Google’s work.

My admiration does non blind me to the shortcomings of motorcar translation, however. Think of the immature Dutch traveller who knew ‘shitloads’ of English. The immature man’s fluency demonstrated that his ‘wetware’ – a living neural network, if yous volition – had been trained good plenty to intuit the subtle rules (and exceptions) that brand linguistic communication natural. Computer languages, on the other hand, create got context-free grammars. The immature Dutchman, however, lacked the social sense amongst English linguistic communication to grasp the subtler rules that variety the native speaker’s diction, tone too structure. The native speaker mightiness also take away to suspension those rules to attain certainly effects. If I were to state ‘shitloads of places’ rather than ‘lots of places’ to a yoke of nuns, I would hateful something yesteryear it. The Dutchman blundered into inadvertent comedy....

Also related:

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me yesteryear calling me "old," when I would NEVER telephone telephone him "short too fat?" Oh well, I endeavour so hard to hold upwards his friend - too possibly someday that volition happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017