{"id":3368,"date":"2020-08-19T15:43:40","date_gmt":"2020-08-19T15:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/?p=3368"},"modified":"2026-04-12T04:15:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T04:15:01","slug":"beat-the-machine-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/2020\/08\/19\/beat-the-machine-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Beat the Machine: Weaving Musical Genres in Austria?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a>Welcome to part two of our inaugural Beat the Machine mini translation slam! In our July post<\/a>, I asked FLD members to re-translate a complicated sentence to improve upon the machine translation output provided in the post. Now it\u2019s time to review some of the submissions!<\/p>\n

Before diving in, I would like to acknowledge that I may have had a little<\/em> bit of hubris when selecting this first sentence. One of my favorite FLD members suggested it and I thought, \u201cperfect, this thing is a mess, let\u2019s do it!\u201d Then I sat down to tackle it myself and\u2026 eesh<\/em>, this sentence really was a challenge! The good news is that this has been a fun learning experience for us all, and I now know what I\u2019m looking for in future sentences. The other good news is that many of our colleagues were clearly less daunted than I and submitted some really creative solutions. So, let\u2019s dig in!<\/p>\n

To refresh our memory, this was the sentence we were working with:<\/p>\n

L\u2019excellentissime pianiste classique autrichien Friedrich Gulda n\u2019e\u00fbt peut-\u00eatre pas \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019accord, lui qui ne cessa de transgresser les deux grands ordres (jazz et classique) en les reprisant et d\u00e9prisant dans des concerts qui filaient standards de jazz, classiques des classiques.<\/em><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s what DeepL gave us:<\/p>\n

Perhaps the excellent Austrian classical pianist Friedrich Gulda would not have agreed, as he never stopped transgressing the two great orders (jazz and classical) by reproducing them in concerts that spun jazz standards, classics from classics.<\/em><\/p>\n

As foreshadowed, there are a lot of things we\u2019re working with here. There are four different parts to this monster, so let\u2019s take it part by part before addressing some really neat things some people did with the structure of the sentence as a whole.<\/p>\n

L\u2019excellentissime pianiste classique autrichien Friedrich Gulda\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

In the first seven words, everyone agrees about three of them. \u201cFriedrich Gulda\u201d and \u201cAustrian\u201d are pretty concrete! Things immediately diverge after that. Some of the options for excellentissime<\/em> were excellent, brilliant, and outstanding. However, two people did something pretty clever here, opting for \u201cvirtuoso\u201d in English. This is particularly delightful because it folds the level of skill into the noun: Friedrich Gulda, classical piano virtuoso. The alternative, [adjective] + [classical pianist], is perfectly accurate, but virtuoso conveys a level of talent beyond \u201cexcellent\u201d that better matches excellentissime<\/em> (the –issime<\/em> meaning very <\/em>excellent) and changes up the sentence structure ever so slightly.<\/p>\n

\u2026n\u2019e\u00fbt peut-\u00eatre pas \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019accord\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Everyone went with either \u201cwould not have agreed\u201d or \u201cwould have disagreed.\u201d This a fun reminder that you can structure even seemingly straightforward text more than one way. The difference is slight, but real, and which option is \u201cbetter\u201d depends on the rest of the sentence: is the goal fewer total words? Shorter words? Depending on the context, choosing something like \u201cmay have begged to differ,\u201d could potentially be great.<\/p>\n

\u2026lui qui ne cessa de transgresser les deux grands ordres (jazz et classique)\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Here\u2019s where things start to get messy. Ne cessa de<\/em> became: ceaselessly, always, continued to, constantly, and continually. So many options to convey \u201csomething that never stops!\u201d Transgresser<\/em> is clearly a problem in English, as \u201cto transgress\u201d is much weightier than just mixing musical genres, not to mention the moral or religious overtones. DeepL fell right into this trap. Our human options here included \u201cintermixed,\u201d and \u201ctranscended.\u201d My favorite solutions were \u201cwent outside the box,\u201d which, while it could use a stronger verb than \u201cwent,\u201d encompasses the notion of transgressing in a more palatable way, and my very favorite, \u201cpushed the limits.\u201d He didn\u2019t necessarily break the boundaries, as a transgression might suggest, but he\u2019s right up against it.<\/p>\n

\u2026en les reprisant et d\u00e9prisant dans des concerts\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Oh no, wordplay in the source! The holy grail here would be to come up with something that has the same kind of parallelism or at least some kind of interplay as reprisant et d\u00e9prisant<\/em>. Options included: \u201ccombining and undoing them,\u201d (accurate, if not a little clunky), \u201creappraising and transforming,\u201d (yet clunkier, in my opinion). \u201cTaking them apart and putting them back together\u201d: we\u2019re getting there, it\u2019s literal but closer to the mark. \u201cDeconstructing and reconstructing,\u201d is almost there and is the best non-metaphorical option that was submitted; it checks both boxes, opposite words with a similar structure to match the source.<\/p>\n

However, there was one superlative submission here that does all of the above but also leads into the next part of the sentence beautifully<\/em>: \u201cunraveling and reweaving them in concerts.\u201d I swooned.<\/p>\n

\u2026qui filaient standards de jazz, classiques des classiques.<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The swoon-worthy submission continues: \u201c\u2026that spun together jazz standards and classical classics.\u201d This is why I love this option so much for the previous part. The translator saw filer<\/em> in this section and put it to excellent use in the previous one, using a thread metaphor to describe how Gulda took apart and reassembled the musical components. The use of \u201cspun\u201d continues the metaphor perfectly.<\/p>\n

Lastly, \u201cclassical classics,\u201d submitted by two translators, is snappy and alliterative, and I don\u2019t know what more you could ask.<\/p>\n

Sentence breaks? What are those?<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

This mouthful of a French sentence reminds us that what is valued for style in French doesn\u2019t always correspond to what we look for in English: French sentences can run on and on and on. And I actually chopped this sucker in half before issuing this challenge! Two of the translators used a period and broke it into two fully separate sentences; one person used a semicolon for the same purpose. One option that surprised me was to pull the initial verb (\u201cmight have disagreed\u201d) all the way to the end, so it read something like \u201cFriedrich Gulda, [description], who [did the things], may well have disagreed.\u201d This, again, is a decision where context matters, and this option may or may not flow into what comes next in the text. But it certainly has the option to, and that\u2019s awesome. Next time, I\u2019ll provide more context so that we can better evaluate options like this one.<\/p>\n

Putting it all together, this is a string combining my personal favorite individual translation solutions for this sentence:<\/p>\n

Friedrich Gulda, the classical piano virtuoso who continually pushed the limits of two great genres (jazz and classical), unraveling and reweaving them in concerts that spun together jazz standards and classical classics, may well have disagreed.<\/em><\/p>\n

You know what? I think that\u2019s pretty good! That\u2019s a well-crafted sentence. And, given the notable lack of preceding or following sentences, I can claim it is ideal for the context. So\u2026 whew! We made it! I hope that it was useful and informative to see how many options there are for even simple phrases, and what neat things you can achieve with even mundane words. Stay tuned for next month, where we\u2019ll do it all again (with a more approachable sentence this time!).<\/p>\n

Did you forget to submit a translation in time? Not to worry! Share your version on Twitter and tag the French Language Division (@ATA_FLD<\/a>) and me, @SamTranslates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you would like to submit a sentence for a future slam, I would like that very much! You can contact me, Sam Mowry, directly at sam [at] translation.expert or on Twitter at the handle listed above. You can also contact the \u00c0 Propos<\/em> Editor Ben Karl at ben [at] bktranslation.com.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to help launch a similar slam but into French, please also reach out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to part two of our inaugural Beat the Machine mini translation slam! In our July post, I asked FLD members to re-translate a complicated sentence to improve upon the machine translation output provided in the post. Now it\u2019s time to review some of the submissions!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beat-the-machine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4850,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions\/4850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}