The importance of context is playfully, famously explored in the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The narrator explains that Pierre Menard is engaged in an ambitious project to re-create Don Quixote, not as Cervantes wrote it but as it would signify to a twentieth-century writer. Phrases that were platitudes for Cervantes—“truth, whose mother is history”—become for Menard iconoclastic thoughts so radical that it takes the utmost effort to conceive of them. “History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding,” the narrator exclaims after comparing Cervantes’s text with an apparently identical passage from Menard. “Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin,” calling such a conclusion “brazenly pragmatic.”

Given that the human touch is essential to full and accurate translation, the question remains whether intelligent machines can ever understand (not merely process) language. A promising beginning is the nascent field of machine reading. At Carnegie Mellon University, Tom Mitchell and his team of computer-science students have developed NELL (Never-Ending Language Learning), a program that reads text “in the wild” (i.e., unstructured, unrestricted text on the Internet) and draws inferences of the type “X is a type of Y which is a Z.” Based on its reading, the program proposes “candidate facts,” tests them against facts already in its knowledge database, and if they are consistent, promotes them to the level of “beliefs.” Some of the facts sound mundane—“golden_bellied_euphonia is a bird”; “vastus_medialis is a muscle”—until we realize that the operations required to create them include drawing inferences from contexts where the fact itself is not explicitly stated.

Also illuminating are the program’s mistakes, which invite speculation about the kinds of texts that could lead the program to this conclusion. My favorite, recently posted at the project’s website (which features an ever-changing list of “recently discovered facts”), is “english is the language of the country japan.” Despite its limitations, the program has the great advantage of reading 24/7. Who knows how smart it may be when, say, it is ten years old, or what a wild, wacky universe it may have inferred from the cacophony of millions of human voices?

Regardless of whether or not we have translation machines in the basement, we are all calling out to be understood. Every act of communication is an attempt to share those “illuminations that erupt in the mind” that Anthony referred to in his first posting. In articulating our individual take on the world, we affirm our identity, and in sharing those takes with others, we define ourselves in relation to them. Do we inhabit the same world? What, as one commentator asks, might I learn from our differences?

These questions of identity and representation arise at a cultural and national level as well. One of the most interesting developments in international relations recently has been the rise of soft power and public diplomacy. Soft power, as defined by scholar Joseph Nye, is the power of attraction, dialogue, and mutual benefit as opposed to the hard power of coercion. Public diplomacy involves the promotion and management of a national reputation in order to gain influence abroad.

What does this have to do with translation? I’m going to focus on choice, since it has been raised in the Forum, and since choice also constitutes my answer to Lane’s question “What do people understand least about translation that you would want them to know?”

In the first place, we are all constantly making choices when deciding what it is we want to translate into words. At a national level, there is a similar concern with what to say, what kind of image to project, what story to tell about oneself, how to make it relevant, attractive, and convincing. As I suggested above, our identities depend on this initial choice.

Second, there are choices to be made when translating: whether to translate what has been said, as in Anthony’s Catalan toast example, or what is understood: the said or the unsaid. The influence of the simultaneous interpreter on political negotiations reflects the central role of choice.

Finally, there are the choices we do not have because the grammar of a language denies them to us. Here we return to Lane’s first posting on the nature of language. I’ll conclude with an example: the term ‘”soft power” has positive connotations in English, by analogy with other compound words such as “soft drink,” “soft landing,” “soft answer,” and “soft sell.” Since no other language has an equivalent array of soft-something compounds, “soft” doesn’t have the same meaning outside English. Quite on the contrary, its connotations err towards weakness. Will we ultimately have no choice but to abandon the term “soft power” because it doesn’t translate well?

The young French theorist Arnaud Laygues relates this back to the philosophy of dialogue (Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas), to the ethics of dialogue with people rather than the manipulation of things. I would want to extend it to a humanism of communication in general, with applications to cross-cultural communication in particular. And I am not too worried about the archaic sense of the term “humanism”: the Renaissance’s Leonardo Bruni argued, like Laygues, that Plato should be translated as a person, not as a scholastic textbook. There is nothing radically new here.

American academics have nevertheless discovered translation belatedly. It seems a useful metaphor, to overcome the way the academy has divided up languages and literatures. But they are drawing a lot on Formalist aesthetics (Borges’s Pierre Menard) and Germanic thought (from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Walter Benjamin). Read those theorists, though, and they’re really talking about relations between languages, and thus relations between cultures. They are not really dealing with communication between people. The Germans attached undue importance to language because it embodied cultural identity, in lieu of a state. And the Formalist play with language was unashamedly antihumanist.

I’ve been suggesting that the words are not so important, that we can translate what is not in the text, that we can and should improve texts. Beyond that, I have little time for the idealization of literary texts. I hope that might upset a few of the academic idées reçues. But here’s what I am really in favor of: I think we have to help people cooperate across cultures, and that translation must be part of that humanistic aim. If not, you’ll never escape from the entanglement of words on words.