You’ve just finished your latest invention: A Universal Translator. While testing it, you accidentally input some human genome and, to your surprise, it begins to work. As it processes you can make out the first few words: “Quality assured by inspector #12.”
An excerpt from Towards a Theory of Universal Translation: Genolinguistics and the Meaning of Life
It was in fact a seemingly harmless incident precipitated by Dr. Odoki that threatened to undermine the entire Universal Translator Project, casting doubts on whether Universal Translation was even a meaningful goal. Odoki was training the Translator on pseudorandom sequences as part of its pattern recognition algorithms, when he inadvertently inputted a section of the human genome. The subsequent output of the Translator is by now infamous among both linguists and biologists alike:
Quality assured by inspector #12.1
Discussing the accuracy of this translation presents unique difficulties, given that the original text, expressed as a sequence of over sixty million base pairs, is far too long to reasonably fit within a paper, and too unwieldy for analysis as a whole.2Thus even a word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme translation of the sequence is a practical impossibility, leaving no mutual ground from which translators can build. Holisticists, such as Ishiguro and van der Hoek, have gone so far as to suggest that comprehending such a complex sequence can only be meaningfully done by machine intelligences, leaving us humans with no other option than to accept the translations we are given.
On the other end of the spectrum, doubters such as Kapinsky have used this incident as proof of the Universal Translation Project’s fundamental flaws. Kapinsky’s argument is that Universal Translation is overly focused on producing comprehensible results, at the expense of accurately translating information. In Kapinsky’s words:
The fallacy of Universal Translation is the assumption that everything in the universe, the utterances of an alien intelligence, will be comprehensible to us as humans, if simply translated in the right way. It’s this assumption that has led to over-generous parameters for pattern recognition: the human genome is nothing more than a sequence of information, correct? Then surely it must have meaning, and surely that meaning can be communicated by something as mundane as words. And so the Universal Translator stretches to communicate a point, and this meaningless nonsense is the result. The possibility that, just perhaps, not all information can be adequately communicated or expressed, completely fails to cross our minds.3
Between these two extremes, where human translation is considered impossible, many alternative translations have been proposed. The so-called “inspector #12″ is commonly understood to refer to a regulator gene, with the phrase as a whole indicating the proper functioning of the gene sequence. Wittier translates the sequence simply as
To be encoded by regulator gene #12.4
claiming that the entirety of human genome could be accurately translated as a similar sequence of instructions. Wittier views phrasing such as “quality assured” to be an overreach on the part of the Universal Translator, better expressed as an indicator that the regulator gene will be at work. Margoulies, on the other hand, adheres more closely to the Universal Translator’s output, insisting that an assurance of quality is different from mere instruction. Her translation of
Regulator gene #12 is well-functioning.5
maintains that the sequence expresses a positive claim about its own functioning, indicating a capacity for judgement. For Margoulies, the language of the human genome is not simply a list of instructions to be followed, but also a set of standards and goals and evaluations that are expressed in the formation of a human being.
Meanwhile, Kiang Kang-Hu, in a particularly controversial approach, identifies a so-called section of ‘junk DNA’ within the sequence as a deictic pronoun indicating the first person, and has proposed the radical translation of
I, regulator #12, assure quality.6
In Kiang’s view, language cannot exist separate from a speaker, and thus any so-called translations that reduce the sequence’s meaning to mere statements of biological fact are simply embarrassed attempts to explain away the initial anomalies of the Universal Translator Project. In Kiang’s own words:
A pattern is not language. A listed sequence of events, independent of purpose, is not language, not anymore than the tide leaving its marks on the shore is language. Call a geologist to interpret marks that erosion has etched in stone, not a linguist! What the Universal Translation Project has given us is not pattern recognition. It’s communication. It’s the voices of the universe calling out to us.
There’s a language in our bones, in our blood, in our DNA. You, and I, and everyone else, we are not just a set of facts to be written down and catalogued. We’re a hundred million stories, each and every one of us. All we need to do is listen.7
1Version 2.1 of Universal Translator [Computer software]. (2034).
2The complete sequence can be found at https://ut.qi/KLR83345
3Andreas Kapinsky, The Death of Meaning, trans. Nicholas Sherridan, (Oblivion Books, 2036), 24.
4Byrnner Wittier, An Introduction to Biological Linguistics, (Columbia University Press, 2041), 56.
5G. Margoulies, Anthologie Raisonné de la Traducion, trans. Wang Wei, (Payot, 2038), 1196Kiang Kang-Hu, Regulator #12, and the Rest of Humanity, (Puffin Press, 2044), 85.
7Ibid., 216-217
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#storytime #language
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