Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 1 of 46 Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities Arle Lommel German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DKFI) Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 2 of 46 A bit about me • Linguist and folklorist/ethnographer • Working at an artificial intelligence center • Developing specifications for translation quality • 15+ years of experience in translation/ localization standardization Before I begin, I thought I would tell you a little bit about myself and why I fjnd the topic today—standards for localization and translation and their relationship to cultural knowledge—interesting. By academic training I am a linguist and folklorist. Particularly in the latter regard, I am educated in ethnology and cultural semiotics. I am deeply interested in musical instruments, a topic I will return to as a parallel to my primary topic a little later one. At the same time, for over 15 years I have been working in the fjeld of translation technology in one capacity or another and for that entire time I have been involved in the development of localization standards in various bod- ies, including the now-defunct Localization Industry Standards Association, OASIS, ASTM, ISO Technical Com- mittee 37 (from which I know Dr. Hendrik Kockaert), the Globalization and Localization Association, the W3C, and other bodies, all of which I have been actively involved in at some point. Tiese are all *technical* bodies and in them I have been involved in defjning XML tags and formats, developing methods for transferring digital data between computer applications, and defjning abstract representations of the data needed to ensure that translators can have access to the information they need to do their jobs. Tiis information includes details about the terms that particular companies use in their documentation, relevant texts that have previously been translated, information on expectations for translation, and a host of other details that impact the act of translators. My current work, for the past two and a half years at the German Center for Artifjcial Intelligence in Berlin, has been on standardizing the representation of errors in translations, a topic that is of interest to individuals here at KU Leuven who are active in the same fjeld. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 3 of 46 Translation quality = Spaghetti? (While I will not go into details of my work, I would like to show a picture of how complex categorizations of translation problems can be. We like to call this the bowl of spaghetti. Ti is may be complex, but we actually do use a subset of it for research into machine translation.) Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 4 of 46 What is the goal of digital humanities? At some level, you may well wonder what I, a geek who deals in bits and bytes and arcana about digital resources, could have to say about the digital humanities. Afuer all, if the digital humanities have a unifjed goal… Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 5 of 46 I don’t have an answer, but surely it must involve the preservation and dissemination of diverse cultural knowledge. …it surely must have to do with the preservation of diversity and rescuing products of human culture that would otherwise disappear. While digital humanities certain involves doing other, interesting things with the output of human culture, the foundational aspect is the ability to represent and preserve such diverse items as literary works, spoken texts, paintings, music, and dance. Surely, as culture fmowers about us and forever escapes our control and attempts to defjne it, standardization works contrary to this goal. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 6 of 46 But standardization is the application of homogeneity. Why would standardization be good for that which cannot and should not be standardized? Does standardization aid and abet those who would extract and exploit culture or try to impose homogeneity? Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 7 of 46 Does standardization abet cultural imperialism? Put another way, does standardization end up just abetting cultural imperialism by allowing those in the center to exploit those elsewhere by forcing them to do things in one way? Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 8 of 46 Does standardization turn cultural knowledge into a commodity? In my efgorts I have, not infrequently, been accused of facilitating a process that turns human cultural output into a commodity, that reduces individuals to interchangeable widgets. Much of my work has been around machine translation, and this topic strikes fear into the hearts of many translators, who believe that the end goal of efgorts in this fjeld is to replace them entirely, taking their hard intellectual work and converting it to mere mechanical process. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 9 of 46 I am morally on par with the makers of the atomic bomb!* *I don’t really believe this Within the last year I and a colleague were publicly accused in a conference of being like the inventors of nuclear weapons and told that our standardization efgorts, however well intentioned, were morally on par with launching a missile at a defenseless city. Setting aside the hyperbolic nature of this claim, it gets at a real tension. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 10 of 46 Defining things in a standard fashion is a controversial action . Culture cannot be standardized and cannot be converted into units of production, and yet standards have the potential to do just this. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 11 of 46 A quality translation demonstrates required accuracy and fluency for the audience and purpose and complies with all other specifications negotiated between the requester and procvider, taking into account end-user needs . As part of the same work that led to the comparison of me and my colleague to the makers of weapons of mass destruction, I have worked on providing a universal (or standard) defjnition of translation quality. Tiose not in- volved with translation are ofuen surprised to discover that theories of translation theory provide them with no operative way of telling whether a translation is good or not. I am sure that this fact surprises no-one here, but companies buying translation are surprised, because they have money on the line and need a way to tell whether the work of a translator will result in customer satisfaction or disapproval. Tieir urgent business need runs directly contrary to any theory that says that translation quality cannot be measured. So the approach taken in my work draws directly on functionalist approaches to translation and states that translation quality is relative to expecta- tions negotiated between the party buying the translation and the one providing it, and that translation must meet purpose-driven minimum levels of accuracy and fmuency, taking into account the needs of end users. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
Arle Lomme • 10.September 2014 • KU Leuven Digital Humanities Summer School • Slide 12 of 46 A radical definition of quality for many people From my perspective, such a defjnition is an improvement over any approach that maintains that all translations must strive for the same Platonic ideal of perfect translation. It is thus a radical reinterpretation of quality away from absolutist approaches that do not consider purpose. Tiis approach puts quality squarely in the center of a complex dynamic with multiple parties, but gives priority to the relationship between the requester of the transla- tion and its provider. It allows for various requirements. Standardization and the tension between the unique and the homogeneous in the Digital Humanities
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