Literary experiments with automatic translation : a case study of a creative experiment involving King Ubu and Google Translate

The 1994 Encyclopaedia of Mathematics entry on automatic translation informs us that "automatic translation of literature and fiction is both unrealistic and unnecessary." This seems to be a frequent view, accompanied by a certain anxiety among translation professionals as to the threat of automatic translation "stealing their jobs" within their lifetimes. Such is the context for our study of literary experiments carried out with Google Translate, of which the translation of King Ubu published by the Korporacja Ha!art is an example. Since King Ubu by Alfred Jarry, a play written as a joke by a schoolboy over a century ago, can be seen as one of the pioneering works of absurdist literature, this conceptual publication is doubly absurd, with a machine translation technique applied to an absurdist play. The chapter includes an overview of the creative applications of automatic translation, and provides an analysis of the implications of the experiment. The conceptual character of the translation is explained through an analysis of the Polish contexts of Jarry’s work. Our thesis is that the described experiment (printed publication of the automatically translated play) has a deep, conceptual meaning only when performed in the Polish language.