The Tower of Babel: From Babylon to Babel Fish

Abstract

This lecture takes up the myth of Babel as an occasion to examine topics in the humanities and social sciences: from the relationship between language and knowledge to the effects of globalisation on linguistic diversity to the contribution of technology to cross-cultural communication. Materials range from the Bible to modern literature, linguistics, architecture, philosophy, and science fiction.

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

Terrific advances in generative AI have reinvigorated ancient myths of a world without linguistic barriers, prompting new visions of effortless, instantaneous, and universal translation. At last, the benefits of knowledge, culture, and Yelp reviews will flow freely from one end of the globe to the other! At last, the conflict and confusion sown by our many, mutually incomprehensible languages will come to an end! Human communication has been waiting a long time for such a software update. Complaints about the confusio linguarum—our current condition of linguistic diversity—go back to the Hebrew Bible. Once, that text relates, “all the earth was one language and one set of words,” but God, disapproving of His creations’ towering ambitions, intervened to make their speech unintelligible to one another. Confusion descended in an instant upon the world’s first great city, which thereby acquired the name Babel. Though the babelians are said to have left their metropolis shortly thereafter, the shadow of their cursed city and its famous tower has colored world culture ever since. The tale of Babel and its tower is one of the most enduring stories in world literature. It stretches from 2500-year-old cuneiform inscriptions detailing the tiered composition of Mesopotamian ziggurats to Douglas Adams’s fictional “Babel Fish,” a slippery, organic earpiece whose faculty of simultaneous translation has inspired much tech-sector R&D. This course follows Babel’s afterlife in four works of 20th-century literature, including Adams’s 1979 novel The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Each literary text will be an occasion for us to examine the Babel’s ongoing relevance as an archetype, a metaphor, and a moral in the domains of politics, science, and architecture. Its tower will be our landmark as we explore the boundaries between languages and nations, between historical and natural laws, and between physical and digital space.

Resources