What I Learned Today

Others in my French Translation class have chosen works of literature for their translation projects. Me? I chose a recent article announcing a terribly exciting discovery: the first rocky exoplanet! (As opposed to the “hot Jupiters” and other large gaseous planets.) I found this article on the radio-canada.ca website:

Une première exoplanète rocheuse
(16/9/2009)

Près de 15 ans après la découverte de la première exoplanète en 1995, des astrophysiciens européens ont annoncé avoir trouvé une toute première planète de type rocheuse autour d’une autre étoile que notre Soleil. L’exoplanète Corot 7b avait été observée en début d’année, mais sa composition n’avait pu être établie à ce moment. Sa constitution n’est pas l’unique particularité de Corot 7b. Elle est également la plus petite jamais découverte, avec un rayon équivalent à 1,8 fois celui de la Terre. De plus, c’est la planète la plus proche de son étoile. Elle en fait le tour en seulement 20 heures (correspondant à la durée de son année). Le spectrographe HARPS installé sur le télescope européen de 3,6 mètres de la Silla, au Chili, a également permis d’établir que sa masse correspondait à 4,8 fois celle de la Terre.

Vie impossible
La température dépasse 2000 degrés Celsius sur la face éclairée, puisqu’elle est située à seulement 2,5 millions de kilomètres de son étoile. L’astre pourrait avoir des océans de lave à sa surface. L’autre face, plongée dans la nuit, est glaciale, avec des températures qui plongent sous les -200 degrés Celsius. À titre de comparaison, la Terre tourne à 150 millions de kilomètres du Soleil.

En avril dernier, Gliese 581e avait été présentée comme la plus petite exoplanète. Les découvreurs de Corot 7b estiment que seule la masse de cette dernière est connue, ce qui n’est pas le cas pour Gliese 581e.

Even though my French Translation class is obviously in the humanities, I was a little surprised at some of the students’ reaction to this article — it clearly was perceived as a bit out of place! However, several people commented on how they learned a lot from it: some didn’t even know that we’d discovered exoplanets (!) and others did additional research, reporting (correctly) that we’ve discovered more than 300 of these bodies! So I guess it turned out to be an unexpected chance to sow a little science, and alert others to one of the most amazing advances we’ve made in the last couple of decades (in my humble opinion).

But without further ado, here is my translation:

The first rocky exoplanet

Nearly 15 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995, European astrophysicists announced that they have found the very first rocky exoplanet around a star other than our Sun. The exoplanet Corot 7b was observed at the beginning of the year, but its composition could not be established until now. Its composition is not Corot 7b’s only distinction. It is also the smallest ever discovered, with a radius equivalent to 1.8 times that of the Earth. Moreover, it is the planet closest to its own star. It orbits in only 20 hours (corresponding to the length of its year). The HARPS spectrograph installed on the 3.6-meter European telescope at La Silla [an observatory], in Chile, has also established that its mass corresponds to 4.8 times that of the Earth.

Life is impossible
Temperatures exceed 2000 degrees Celsius on the illuminated side, since the planet is located only 2.5 million km from its star. The planet* may have oceans of lava on its surface. The other side, plunged into night, is icy, with temperatures that drop to less than -200 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the Earth orbits at 150 million km from the Sun.

Last April, Gliese 581e was presented as the smallest exoplanet. The discoverers of Corot 7b consider mass to be [definitively] known only for Corot 7b, and not for Gliese 581e.

*The word “astre” is translated as “star”, but that makes no sense here; it should be “planet”.

I must say, that final sentence gave me the most trouble! Suggestions about other ways to phrase it are certainly welcome.

In class, we discussed my translation, and I received several suggestions about ways to improve it:

• “à ce moment” should have been translated as “at that time” rather than “until now.”
• Consider “duration of its year” rather than “length of its year.”
• Consider breaking the final sentence of the first paragraph into two sentences, as it is rather unwieldy.
• Consider changing “The other side, plunged into night” to simply “The dark side” (for clarity over poetry). I disliked “plunged” myself, because it sounds overly dramatic. If wishing to stick closer to the original, someone else suggested “The other side, immersed in night” (less sense of active motion).
• Apparently “À titre de comparaison” is a stock phrase that means “By way of comparison,” although “For comparison” also works (is probably less formal, though).

After class, I checked how Babelfish and Google Translate rendered this text into English. The Babelfish version is heart-stoppingly bad, beginning with

“Nearly 15 years after the discovery of the first exoplanète in 1995, of the European astrophysicists announced to have found a very first planet of the rock type around d’ another star that our Sun.”

It’s not terrible that Babelfish doesn’t know the word “exoplanète”, but its inability to handle contractions throughout the article is really inexcusable, especially for French! Google Translate’s version is consistently better, but not perfect. The first sentence is rendered:

“Nearly 15 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995, the European astrophysicists have announced to have found a first-type rocky planet around a star other than our Sun,”

but it failed to catch the negation in the second:

“The COROT exoplanet 7b was observed earlier this year, but its composition had been established at this time.”

(Also humorous is its translation of “581e” as “581st” — subtle!)

I guess I am encouraged that there’s still a need for human translators!

Les critiques judicieux sont rares.

This was the first sentence that I was called on to read aloud, and translate, at the first meeting of my French Translation course. For no obvious reason, the professor called on me first. I hadn’t realized that we’d be getting a chance to also practice our pronunciation (bonus!). I read it out loud, and then translated:

Fair critics are rare.

And we were off! We continued around the room, reading and translating sentences from the textbook. We completed all of Chapter 1 (to be, negation, plural nouns, articles, to have, the partitive pronoun en, -er verbs) in the first class, and Chapter 2 (-ir verbs, demonstrative adjectives, -re verbs, imperative verbs, reflexive verbs) in the second class; our professor says that we’ll slow down around Chapter 5 when things get “plus difficile”.

The authors of our textbook frequently have chosen quotes from famous French philosophers as example sentences for us to translate. Therefore, instead of dull sentences like “The cat is black,” we end up debating whether or not we agree with a particular statement about the purpose of life or the differences between men and women. This also means that the sentences are more challenging (which I like) since they sometimes involve abstract concepts or comparisons that really cannot be rendered literally. Here are some examples:

• Il n’y a pas de roses sans épines. (Proverbe) “There are no roses without thorns.” (Or “Every rose has its thorn,” in 80’s parlance.)
• Je n’imagine pas le génie, sans le courage. (Montherlant) Lit. “I do not imagine genius without courage,” which doesn’t really work. Instead, “I cannot imagine genius without courage,” or even “Genius is impossible without courage.”
• Quand un acteur est mauvais, l’applaudissement le rend pire. (Renard) “When an actor is bad, applause makes him worse.”
• Ceux qui s’appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes. (La Rouchefoucauld) “Those who devote themselves to small things usually become incapable of accomplishing large ones.” (Excellent advice for work, eh?)
• Les livres d’histoire qui ne mentent pas sont tous fort maussades. (A. France) “History books that do not lie are all very dull.”

Translation being a subjective art, please feel free to suggest improvements to these renditions.

We’ve had two classes now with no homework! In the meantime, I’ve been compiling a list of sources of public domain French texts for potential practice, including the French wikisource, the Internet Archive, and feedbooks. As usual, there’s so much more out there than I could ever hope to read!

Programming is the art of working out the logic needed to obtain some desired behavior from a system, such as a computer. I’m so used to achieving this with symbols, variables, and control keywords that it hadn’t really occurred to me that the same process has been used since long before computers were invented. Mechanical devices are “programmed” by specifying their physical design, and their behavior is “executed” with physics, not a CPU.

This came to me while I was reading a children’s book describing how a toaster works. What is the job of a toaster? To lie dormant until bread is inserted, then heat up for an appropriate amount of time, then automatically turn off and pop the toast up for easy removal. If I were going to create my own toaster, I’d go at it from a computer-logic perspective: acquire a sensor to measure the current toastiness of the bread (perhaps just its temperature), and then program a tiny embedded chip to respond when the sensor exceeds the desired threshold, at which point the toaster would send a command to the release lever so that the toast would be ejected. But is that how toasters are designed? No!

Toasters are a complete marvel of physics-based programming. There is no embedded chip, no logic to specify, no commands. Instead, the toaster relies on a bimetal bar, which bends to the left or right depending on the temperature, because its two metals expand at different rates. (I first encountered bimetallics when I asked my dad how our thermostat worked.) The same current that heats the toaster coils flows through this bimetal bar, and it gradually bends to the side, until it nudges the “heat-up lever” out of contact and instead engages the “cool-off lever”; as it cools back down and straightens, it then releases the cool-off lever which allows the spring-loaded release to pop the bread up.

Got that? There is no timer in your toaster! (Unless you have some new-fangled version that does in fact use a computer chip.) The timer effect is achieved by simple physics. This is an entirely different kind of programming which must have originally required a lot of trial and error: how long should the bimetal bar be? How thick? Which metals should be used, to get the right differential lengthening? And then there’s the clever puzzle of how to set up the system of levers so that the bending of the bar triggers them in the right order, purely mechanically.

I had always wondered why toasters don’t let you specify a toasting duration, instead of trying to figure out what a unitless dial that goes from 1 to 10 really means in terms of toastiness. Wikipedia relates that early toasters did have timers you manually set, but this caused problems because the first piece of toast needs longer than subsequent ones to achieve the same done-ness. Using the bimetal bar as a toast-proxy works better because it reflects the thermal properties of the heating elements and naturally adjusts the toasting time to fit.

This cleverness isn’t just about toasters: it’s alarm clocks and vending machines and cameras and all sorts of other devices. This kind of “programming” reminds me of dominoes: setting up all the pieces so that they fall into the right places at the right time. What contraints under which to operate! What an interesting development environment!

Maybe I’ve been living in the computer world for too long.

Next up: The transparent toaster.

… using your own skills, not babelfish or Google translate, that is.

Fall is coming, and everyone’s going back to school. While browsing a bulletin board at the local movie theater, an ad for a class on French translation caught my eye. I realized that it had been over a year since my last course (Geology 601, Seminar in Sedimentary Geology), and really, that’s just too long a gap. Plus, French! Examining my weekly commitments, I decided that I had room to take on another one.

One reason I haven’t taken more language classes in recent years is that, lacking some real-world setting in which I would need to use those skills, I know whatever I’d learn would fade gradually after the class ended. But it occurred to me that this could be different. Polishing up reading and translation skills would mean that I could return to my French copy of “Fellowship of the Ring” or “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Little Prince” (or several others I have). I could browse French websites and news articles. It’s a skill I could more realistically have a chance to retain. And I was curious: how would a course teach you to translate, in a way different from a regular language class that teaches you more vocabulary and grammar? Why the specialization?

So I applied to the local community college and was accepted just six hours later. The textbook is a photocopied version of French for Reading Knowledge. It seems that a focus on reading can indeed be a bit different from a regular language class; I think it may be optimized for you to simply acquire a mapping of French constructions into English ones. The result almost certainly is not true fluency, since you need not generate your own constructions or worry about pronunciation or anything like that. This seems a little like cheating, except that the reading skill alone can have real value. Some people take this sort of class to be able to read technical articles related to their research that have not yet been translated. And as above, it’s the skill you could most likely keep practiced even if you don’t live in a French-speaking country.

Classes with similar titles are offered at other schools. The “French for Reading Knowledge” course at UW Madison fulfills a graduate student foreign language requirement. At the conclusion of the class, you must take a one-hour translation test. Want to try your own hand? Here’s a PDF version of their Fall 2008 exam, which is a five-paragraph bit about Vladimir Nabokov. You’re permitted a French-English dictionary.

I’m eager to see how this class works out. Will we be assigned specific texts, or will we be encouraged to choose our own? I’m envisioning some interesting discussions about literal translations versus those that deviate from the actual words but capture more of the sense, style, or feel of a passage. Will we talk about translating poems and songs, which are extra-challenging due to both a need for non-literalism and a desire to preserve rhyme and meter? Class doesn’t start until September 3, and I already have a host of questions to ask!

During my latest volunteer time at the library, I was asked to shelve more books. (Not that I really needed asking—I was already heading for the shelving carts.) I was given four shelves’ worth of “E” books (about 150 books, or probably 1/3 of the library’s holdings in that section). I think “E” stands for “Elementary”; these are books marked as Level 1, 2, or 3, which I gather is something like grades 1-3. At any rate, when I reached the “E” section, I found that it was already in severe disarray. So I sat down (these shelves are at kids’ height) and started shelf-reading and swapping books back into proper order.

During this process, I observed first-hand three specific sources of shelf entropy:

• A toddler playing the “game” of remove-and-replace-randomly. (Possibly an attempt to imitate what I was doing, but not with any sense of the actual order.)
• An indecisive and sulky 6-year-old who was told by her mother to “get 12 books”. She’d pull out a book, glance at it, and either thrust it back onto the shelf somewhere else, or … throw it on the ground.
• The same 6-year-old’s embarrassed mother, who would pick up each discarded book and put it back somewhere on the shelf… not only in some new location, but with the spine facing inward! While this made it easy to spot misplaced books, I was puzzled as to how anyone would assume that that’s the proper thing to do in a library. Especially while I’m sitting two feet away obviously ordering the books myself.

As I worked, I overheard one of the children’s librarians advising an adult reader, who was participating in the library’s Literacy tutoring program and wanted to know which books to start with. The librarian said,

“Here’s the advice I give kids: the rule of 5. Open the book and read the first page. Each time you reach a word you don’t know, count it on a finger. If you get to 5 by the end of the first page, the book is too hard. If you only get to 1, it’s too easy. Find a book somewhere in the middle, and that will mean you’re learning.”

This advice struck me in two ways. First, how long has it been since I deliberately tried to find an English book to read that would actively stretch my vocabulary? And second, my, how wonderful it would be to have access to a huge selection of children’s books in whatever foreign language I wanted to learn! I’ve picked up kids’ books in Japanese and French on various trips, but they’re harder to come by here, and often pricey to order remotely. But a library! That would be perfect! Do the ESL learners here know how lucky they are? :) And are they aware of their anti-entropic efforts?

“The pursuit of knowledge is my own little battle against the second law of thermodynamics.” – Jeff Vinocur