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The Tower of Babel: From Babylon to Babel Fish
Last Updated: 2026-02-05 16:29:06
Abstract
"Will the vocabularies never cease clashing/Werden die Wörterbücher immer streiten/Will the bickerwords never grow silent."- Eugene Jolas, "Babel: 1940"
Objective
To situate contemporary discussions of machine translation in relation to earlier literary and philosophical reflections on the problem of linguistic diversity. To gain familiarity with historical origins of machine translation and the stages of its development until the present. To draw historical, thematic, and conceptual connections between the emergence of machine translation in the middle of the twentieth century and the impulses driving post-war literary and theoretical texts. To apply information theory to the analysis of literary texts. To use literary texts to interrogate the operation of telecommunications systems and the assumptions on which those systems rest. To practice inter- and intra-linguistic translation and confront the problem of "the untranslatable."
Content
There’s a story about an astounding feat of technological ingenuity and collective action. All the earth is bound together in a project of unprecedented scope, whose full implications exceed what finite, human minds can comprehend. The power unleashed by frictionless communication, collaboration, and innovation promises to transform them into gods. But the project derails spectacularly: the synergy of the corporate body fragments into warring, mutually incomprehensible interests, tribes, nations. In the end, the very technology with which they hoped to transcend their provincialism is repurposed as a weapon that each clan turns against the other. This could easily be a cautionary tale about social media, machine translation, and the Tech Giants that preside over the collective, digitized labor of humanity. In fact, it is an old fable about a city, a tower, and a Babylonian “giant” named Nimrod. The story of Babel and its tower occupies only nine verses of the Hebrew Bible. These nine verses, which detail how over the course of a? massive project the one, common language of humanity splintered into a host of mutually incomprehensible tongues, have cast a long shadow across world literature. This course will track the sweep of this shadow across several languages and literatures, lingering over several moments in the story’s two-thousand-year history of transmission and translation--from Dante’s treatise on the vernacular to Early Modern “language projectors” to Romantic philosophy and philology. The final unit of our course will examine the 19th and 20th-century tendency to recast of Babel’s tower of bricks as a vertiginous tower of texts. We will conclude the semester by discussing how the old story about a high tower reverberates in the present enthusiasm for Large Language Models.
General Information
- Language
- English
- Levels
- DS , MSC
- Frequency
- Semesterly recurring
Examination
- Type
- graded semester performance
Registration & Places
- Max Places
- 30
Course Components
| Type | Title | Time & Place | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| lecture | The Tower of Babel: From Babylon to Babel Fish |
|
2 h weekly |
Offered In
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Science in Perspective (In “Science in Perspective”-courses students learn to reflect on ETH’s STEM subjects from the perspective of humanities, political and social sciences. Only the courses listed below will be recognized as "Science in Perspective" courses.)
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Type A: Enhancement of Reflection Competence (SiP courses are recommended for bachelor students after their first-year examination and for all master- or doctoral students. All SiP courses are listed in Type A. Courses listed under Type B are only recommendations for enrollment for specific departments.)
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