Stage struck

PETER CRAWLEYon the classics according to Google

‘CONFUSION IS not a humble situation,” says one character in Brian Friel’s Translations. Actually, he says this only if you feed his original line (“Confusion is not an ignoble condition”) through the online translation website Google Translate, convert it to Greek, then use Yahoo’s rival application Babel Fish to convert it back again. A round trip through Hebrew puts the matter thusly: “Confusion does not terms foul.”

At the risk of contradicting Friel, squinting through the scrambled syntax and mangled meanings of these digital polyglots, the terms do seem foul. It is not a humble situation.

In Translations, early 19th- century Ireland is mapped, renamed and standardised by the British Ordnance Survey and meanings are steadily eroded. The place, Baile Beag (“Small Town” – Google Translate), will become Ballybeg. You can see this as the insidious act of a colonial power or an accidental oversight of otherwise well- meaning imperialists.

The latter probably accounts for Google Translate’s comical misapprehensions and bizarre prejudices, which have been bemusing me since a review of Landmark and Galway Arts Festival’s Misterman claimed it “came to a tighten in New York yesterday, following a rarely successful run and most vicious acclaim”.

At first I wasn’t sure if this was entirely incorrect; after all, New York critics can be tough in their flattering. Things became downright ludicrous, though, when it decided that an event celebrating the Polish Romantic poet Mickiewicz in Warsaw would be better rendered as a “Shakespeare” festival in “London”. Damn then! as the French say, apparently.

For all our understanding of its perils, translation has long been a favourite endeavour of Irish writers and playwrights. For the main part, they have been more sensitive to the task than a statistical analysis algorithm with malevolent cultural prejudices. Friel, Frank McGuinness and Tom Murphy have, between them, taken on nearly all of Chekhov, encouraged by the assumption that Russian and Irish writers have a common talent for amusing misery.

Both the poetry of writers and the blips of websites remind us that language is inherently unstable. Handing the job of translation over to a machine is more than an instant generator of gobbledygook. It exposes our anxiety over a failure to communicate, the quiet persistent fear of being misunderstood.

What’s in a name, wondered Shakespeare’s Juliet, before turning her attentions to roses and their scent. “Inside this we called it will rise any other names to glisten is taken to the threshing ground,” she says (by way of Babel Fish, Mandarin and Google Translate).

Sometimes, words truly do fail us.