Prologue

Le Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions

On 2 October, 1872, British gentleman Phileas Fogg, on a £20,000 wager made with friends at his club, set out on the most famous circumnavigation of the world since the voyage of Magalhães. He journeyed around the world in 80 days, an astoundingly fast trip for the period made possible by precise printed timetables, steamers, yachts, railroads, sleighs, an elephant, an overnight bag full of money, the company of an ever-faithful manservant, and vintage British unflappability.^[1]

Today, a century and a half later, we might consider Fogg's frantic race against the clock a leisurely stroll, accustomed as we are to electronic scheduling and even faster modes of travel. If we wish, we can hop from airport to airport – the golden age of railroads is over – and circle the world in only a day or two. Yet, perhaps, what we have gained in speed we may have lost in opportunities to… actually stroll and linger along the way: to engage more fully with other peoples and cultures, to really look at novel landscapes and architectures, to sample unfamiliar dishes and drinks, and to pass our time amid the pleasant cacophony of everyday life spoken in unfamiliar languages.

Fogg’s world was essentially anglophone and anglocentric. In the late 19th century, the sun never set on the British Empire and the ships on which Fogg travelled all sailed under English or American flags. And Fogg wasn’t much interested in making conversation with the locals anyway. He needed only his Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide, and no phrasebook. Today it is easy to travel without knowing any languages besides your native tongue, especially if you parles l’anglais. A street sign only in German or a restaurant menu only in Greek? Point your phone’s camera at the text and it will be instantly translated for you. Want to book a train ticket but the conductor doesn’t understand you? Speak into your phone – the passepartout of the modern digital age – and it will place your reservation in perfect Japanese, or Persian, or Urdu…

Machine translation has made remarkable progress in recent years. But it still has far to go to truly match the elegance of translation by native speakers. Something is nearly always lost in automatic translation, which still tends to miss the nuances of face-to-face conversation and the poetics of prose. And these issues are multipled if the translation passes back and forth between languages or across multiple languages. After a time errors will accumulate, with melodramatic, or comic, or sometimes just nonsensical results. How much of the meaning and structure of the source text is retained in the translated text depends on reference corpora, sample sizes, and the linguistic finesse of translation software. It is often difficult to anticipate when breakdowns in communication will occur, or when, like the children’s parlor game of “telephone” (aka “Chinese whispers” aka téléphone sans fil) distortions of the original emerge to entertain and intrigue us. In a Fogg-like spirit of sober adventure and a playful attachment to the possibilities of the children’s game, we plan to take a journey with machine translation of Verne’s novel.

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Phileas Fogg’s tour of the world, and in celebration of the rich diversity in languages spoken along the path of his trip and beyond, we have selected the first chapter of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, in which Fogg and his manservant Passepartout are introduced to the reader and the voyage that the novel’s title promises is just about to begin. Using Google Translate, we will run the text of the chapter through a series of successive machine translation. Starting with the original French text on the anniversary of Fogg’s departure, we then convert from French to Afrikaans, from Afrikaans to Albanian, from Albanian to Amharic… and so on, ending with Zulu on day 80.^[2] Each resulting translation in a new language generates the source text for the next translation. At each step, we also translate the result back into French to show, in contrast to the starting text, how Verne’s prose is changed along the way.

As we begin our journey, we have no idea how far we will make it before Verne’s original meaning is irreversibly lost, or which insights into the linguistic substructure of his delightful novel may be gained from extending this game until its conclusion. Unlike Fogg, we have no Bradshaw’s for this trip – which makes it all the more interesting!

Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd, Zeist, Netherlands

Terry Harpold, Gainesville, Florida, USA

September–December, 2022

Notes

[1]. Jules Verne, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Hetzel et Cie, 1873. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, nearly 300 different translations of Verne’s novel have been published. Verne, by the way, is listed in the Index as the second-most translated author of world literature.  

[2]. The 80 languages are applied in alphabetical order of their names in English, selected from among the languages that Google Translate offers at the time we begin this project. They are: French, Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Burmese, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Igbo, Ilocano, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Konkani, Korean, Kurdish, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.