James Fallows

For the "glamorous life of a journalist" chronicles, an item from the morning's mail bag, verbatim:

Hi James,

Here's a fun talker for you right in time for Valentine's Day. Want to make the opposite sex swoon? Forget good looks or a charming personality. A new international survey reveals if you want to light libidos on fire, learn to "parle francai"s or "habla espanol" - speak another language!

The international survey of more than 5,000 men and women (1300 Americans) reveals if you speak a different language:
    •    79% find you more attractive
    •    77% rate you as more intelligent

Also, it turns out the French tongue isn't only famous for kissing.

HOTTEST LANGUAGES OF LOVE  
The survey reveals:
    •    French is the #1 Sexiest Language, (chosen by 41%)
    •    #2 Italian (chosen by 16%)
    •    #3 Spanish (chosen by 15%)

Chill dudes. We Americans still have some swag. English ranked #4th sexiest language (chosen by 10%).  And so much for Gangnam style. The Korean language came in dead last - the least sexy language....

When people polled were asked the top pick-up line they'd like to hear or say in another language the top choices are:

#1 "Where have you been all my life?" or in French "Où as-tu été toute ma vie?"
#2 "Can I get you a drink?" or in Italian "Ti posso offrire da bere?"
#3 "I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?"  Or in Spanish "¿Perdí mi número de teléfono, me podrías dar el tuyo?"

The company conducting the survey asks to be credited with its results, and you can find them easily if you search. As well as capsule bios of some of your prospective teachers:

James, we German speakers all figure out that German is a favorite foreign language for gay men here.

I don't know why it works out that way, but I've noticed that for many years.

Maybe a reporter could figure it out?

So many things to catch up on. I'll start with an easy one, a linguistic point.

In response to this explanation of why Bill Clinton is good at explaining complex issues clearly, a reader writes:

Reminds me of the Adlai Stevenson story:

A supporter once called out, "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" And Adlai Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority."

Obama tends to connect to us wonkier people that like math - and have read the CBO reports :-)

Michelle Obama tends to connect with the "feeling" people - she does this wonderfully.

Clinton integrates the two masterfully.  I just love to watch him speak - and realize what an art it is.  He's the corpus callosum of politics - connecting right and left brains together.

And, about my claim that politicians could and should learn from sports-talk radio hosts, another reader writes:

I've begun listening to sports talk radio on my way to work because I cannot bear to listen to the news--even NPR cannot escape the false equivalence trap and I find it depressing.  I am not at all interested in sports--as I was so obsessively when I was a boy.  But I enjoy the calls, the laughs, the passion of everybody on 98.5, The Sports Hub.  And I'm always telling my wife how amazing it is that these people know so much about their sports.  I laugh about it.
 
You are right, though.  Nobody talks down--in fact, the hosts and callers pile on detail after detail, especially here in Massachusetts about the loved/hated/damned poor Red Sox and all their troubles.   I'm going to listen more respectfully now.

Corpus callosum image from here. UPDATE. A reader suggests another area of discourse where we assume the audience to be smart. Thanks to this reader -- and to many, many others whose suggest that any reference beginning "corpus" raises unfortunate unintended imagery concerning Bill Clinton. Assuming the audience here to be smart, and since this is a family-rated magazine site, I will leave it at that.

You contrast sports media with political  media. The other place where the media regularly displays high level reasoning is in high profile court reporting. I first noticed this during the OJ case. Every detail was examined and intricate legal arguments were explored from all sides. The media assumed that their viewers were intelligent enough to follow the discussion, and more important, were interested enough to care about all the details. I don't see this anywhere in the media coverage of political issues.

I mentioned recently the grooves that the Book of Common Prayer had laid down in my brain -- as, it appears, it has done across much of the Anglosphere. 

The more we read, the more we see reminders that experiences or perceptions we thought were distinctive to us are in fact widespread, even banal.

This is encouraging, about the universality of experience. And discouraging, about our capacity for original views.

The Atlantic's literary editor Benjamin Schwarz, who has read as much on as broad a range of topics as anyone I've known, provides the latest reminder for me in this month's "Editor's Choice" column in the magazine*. That's not Ben at the right; it's Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury through the mid-1500s, whose lasting effect on the world was to compose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1549. My wife and sons learned to dread the mention of Thomas Cranmer's name in our household, because I had so often made the point that hearing his works, read aloud, for thousands of hours in my childhood permanently shaped my idea of how an English sentence should sound.

I am not a believing, spiritual person, but from first consciousness until age 17 I spent so much time at Episcopal church services with the "old style" Cranmer liturgy that even now I can recite very long passages by rote. The same is of course true for people exposed to the standard holy texts in most religions: prayers in Hebrew, the old Latin mass, Sutras and Vedas, the Islamic call to prayer, and so on. The distinctive aspect of the Cranmer liturgy is that it is in English -- and a particular form of stately English whose wording may seem antique but whose rhythms retain a classic beauty. I wouldn't, and can't, write the same way. Yet passages like those after the jump have stuck in my mind as the pure idea of how sentences should be paced, should repeat for emphasis yet also vary, should end.

And now I learn from Ben Schwarz that this is a completely clichéd observation!  He reviews a new study of Cranmer's work and says:

Brian Cummings, the editor of this volume, rightly asserts that the language of The Book of Common Prayer "has seeped into the collective consciousness more profoundly than that of any other book written in English, even the Bible." ... [I]t shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language.

This makes me feel better, and worse, for reasons mentioned above. I mention it now both because of the moment of recognition it provoked in me and as a reminder of what's in this new issue of our magazine.*
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For those joining us late: It should be easy for Westerners to say Beijing, but American announcers (especially) keep saying Beizhing. This doesn't "matter," but it's interesting, at least to me. Previous installments here, here, and here.

I've now heard from Chas Freeman, who has particular standing to speak on this topic. In 1972, when he was in his late 20s, he was principal U.S. interpreter for Richard Nixon on his trip to China. As he explains below, he also personally played a big part in the Peking / Beiping / Pei-p'ing / Beijing / Beizhing wars. He reports, with emphasis added:

Beijing, as you know, means "northern capital."  (In the Shanghai and Cantonese dialects of Chinese, it sounds something like Buck-king, which the British, who were notoriously bad at grasping foreign names, rendered as "Peking."  Remember, they were in the South before they were in the North.) 

Chiang Kai-shek [right], whose regime was centered in Nanjing (the "southern capital") could not, for political reasons, accept the "jing" in Beijing and its implication that Beijing was the "capital" of something or other.  He became all the more adamant when he retreated to Taipei and insisted that his offshore Republic of China was the true China, with a provisional capital in Taipei.

At the conclusion of the 1926 - 28 "northern expedition," Chiang proclaimed victory and renamed Beijng as "Beiping" ("northern peace").  In the Wade-Giles orthography that prevailed at the time, this was written "Pei-p'ing."  Westerners naturally pronounced that as "Pay Ping."  John Foster Dulles and others, having been influenced by the "China Lobby," (some of which understood the political subtleties of the Chinese language involved) adamantly enforced the use of Pei-p'ing as the name of the (bogus) capital of the (Soviet puppet) People's Republic of China on pain of political chastisement.  Saying "Peking" was career-threatening.

When I joined the Foreign Service in 1965, I was duly counseled to avoid the use of Peking and to say Pei-p'ing instead.  

This political background helps explain why, when (as Country Director for China) I was asked by the Board of Geographic Names right after "normalization" in 1979 what to do about the names of Chinese places, I decided that we should get rid of Wade-Giles, adopt the official Chinese spellings of place names in "pinyin," and leave the political history of English renderings of Chinese terminological battles behind us.  So Peking became Beijing.

I find if fascinating that people confuse the "j" in Beijing with a "zh" sound.  J and ZH are a consonant contrast that a lot of foreign speakers of Chinese get wrong.

Similarly, from an American now learning Mandarin, about the influence of regional Chinese accents:

My Chinese-American significant other has a Mandarin pronunciation closer to zhing than jing. She is from [a southern Chinese city, in Guangdong province]. They do not speak Cantonese but their own dialect which is closer to Taiwanese. Many overseas Chinese, especially in southeast Asia are Chaozhou-ese. Best known city in their area is Shantou, which uses to be known as Swatow, from their dialect.

I have noticed a southern accent in some of her Mandarin. I wonder if BeiZhing comes from asking the many southern Chinese in this country how it should be pronounced?

She also hates it when my teacher has me talking like a Beijing pirate!

On why the French are always with us:

I am partial to the All Foreign Languages Are French hypothesis, and here's why.

A long time friend from Hyderabad, India, is named Saroja.  Her name is pronounced just the way it looks using standard English phonetic pronunciation, which is to say the j is hard. When she is introduced to a new person, that person always wants to repeat her name to make sure that it was heard right.  Almost always the j comes back softened as a zh.  In general, no matter how many times people hear it with the hard j, they stick with the soft j.

 It's a foreign word; therefore, a French pronunciation is best.

From a Chinese-speaking American in China:

Enjoying the Beizhing discussion and wanted to add a personal anecdote: I often find myself deliberately, somewhat guiltily using the Francofied "zh" pronunciation when speaking of the old North Capital with non-Chinese speakers. I'm not exactly sure why, but suppose I am trying to avoid obnoxiously lording my Mandarin training over the unenlightened.

Another note (and perhaps contradicting my previous statement about not being obnoxious): the "j" sound in Beijing is certainly closer to "jingle bells" than it is to "beige"...but pronounced properly, it sounds more like "dzj" -- somewhat sharper than "j" and pronounced with the tip of the tongue in between your teeth.

Coming tomorrow, or so I plan: more on "junta" -- and on the fascinating entries in the "translate a book title" contest.

Everyone's favorite illustration of the perils of computerized (mis)translation has been the scene at right, from a restaurant in China in the mid-2000s.

Below we have a new candidate, courtesy of a friend in Australia, who in turn relays it from a friend in the Middle East.

Ah, Babel. Ah, computers and their programmers.

(Update: I see that the Guardian is on the case too.)

There's not much time left in the Broadway run of David Henry Hwang's Chinglish. I understand that a West Coast tour will happen later this year, followed perhaps by a movie. Whenever and wherever you might have a chance, my advice is: See it. My wife and I went with friends last night, at the Longacre Theater in New York, and thought it was great.

As for the Salton Sea clip, which has gone up today on the Atlantic's video channel:

1) It's interesting and visually arresting.

2) It is particularly interesting/alarming for me, because I could well have been in one of those shots from the Leave it to Beaver era. Several times in the late Fifties and early Sixties my dad would dragoon the rest of us for the broiling drive down through the desert to Salton City and neighboring developments, with the fantasy that it could be a "good investment" for the family to buy a lakeshore lot there. Thank goodness he never followed through. I will claim that the grade-school version of me is somewhere in shots from the video like the one below -- hey, that could be my sister eating watermelon -- and I defy anyone to disprove it.



Fortunately our Video Channel's Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg pronounces this the "glamorous" era for the Salton Sea. (Other pics here.)

3) The announcer's voice in the old footage shows post-World War II remnants of the striking pre-war "announcer voice," whose rise and amazing near-instantaneous disappearance I mentioned a few weeks ago. I am remiss in not sharing some of the very, very abundant flow of responses about why a style of speaking that dominated American public discourse -- newsreels, plays and movies, some politicians -- is so rarely encountered now. Here come the hypotheses:

Marlon Brando did it:

I'd say the answer to the question of why the transatlantic was no longer called, "standard American speech" is method acting. The schools stopped teaching people to speak as if it were a kind of singing. Movies after Brando, Natalie Wood and James Dean just sounded different. Liz Taylor was one of the few to go "method" and keep the old voice, party because she grew up in England.

Newscasters wanted to reach this new "natural tone." Newscaster accent under the influence of schools shifted to a central Indiana dialect which has an odd nasality that you can often hear.

If anything, the switch can be seen as the triumph of the hard Irish-style "r" which so many people tried to banish on both sides of the Atlantic.

Easy Rider did it:

The end of the Hollywood studio system took away the prescribed elocution classes contract players were required to attend, then the 1960's 'cinema verite' style fad that lasted into the 1970's reached for a gritty, ultra-reality style of film making. "Easy Rider" with a mid-atlantic accent?? The stuffy elocution no longer made sense to that fashion.

You can still hear this voice on stage in pieces written for that voice. Using today's contemporary speech pattern with the formal, florid dialogue sounds ludicrous. As an actor,I enjoy that form of speech. It really helps create an aura of "another time and place" for the actor AND the audience.

Arthur Godfrey did it:

Who dun it?   Arthur Godfrey! From Wikipedia:

"Recovering from a near-fatal automobile accident en route to a flying lesson in 1931 (by which time he was already an avid flyer), he decided to listen closely to the radio and realized that the stiff, formal style then used by announcers could not connect with the average radio listener; the announcers spoke in stentorian tones, as if giving a formal speech to a crowd and not communicating on a personal level. Godfrey vowed that when he returned to the airwaves he would affect a relaxed, informal style as if he were talking to just one person. He also used that style to do his own commercials and became a regional star." and

"Godfrey became nationally known in April 1945 when, as CBS's morning-radio man in Washington, he took the microphone for a live, firsthand account of President Roosevelt's funeral procession. The entire CBS network picked up the broadcast, later preserved in the Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly record series, I Can Hear it Now.

Unlike the tight-lipped news reporters and commentators of the day, who delivered breaking stories in an earnest, businesslike manner, Arthur Godfrey's tone was sympathetic and neighborly, lending immediacy and intimacy to his words. When describing new President Harry S. Truman's car in the procession, Godfrey fervently said, in a choked voice, "God bless him, President Truman." Godfrey broke down in tears and cued the listeners back to the studio. The entire nation was moved by his emotional outburst."

Old-style microphones did it (plus Edward R. Murrow):

I suspect there were two other contributors to the shift. One is that Edward R. Murrow (whose accent hails from Washington state, where he learned voice from a local) mostly picked untrained upper midwest voices. Soon everyone in the news business wanted to sound more or less like Uncle Walter [Cronkite, part of Murrow's team at CBS].

The other thing is that one might notice that nearly everyone in the early days has a voiced pitched in a particular register, a rather high and often somewhat forced sound. I'm guessing that part of the reason for that is that this is the register that the early radio broadcasts carried through the best; as the capabilities of the equipment improves, one starts to hear lower and more natural registers, although there is still a tendency to pick a slightly projecting tone. For instance, listen to Tom Brokaw in this retrospective (YouTube clip.)

In the second segment, you hear his real voice; in the first, his Announcer Voice (capitals and all). One may note that on old Today show broadcasts his voice is also more conversational and less projecting. Back in the oldest days one really did have to sort of shout at the microphone a bit, which also emphasized the high end of the voice. [JF note: From the world of radio, I know that these two registers still exist. You could overstate the difference as "AM Voice" vs "FM Voice." More later.]

Yes, it was the mikes:

My understanding (and my partner's, who was trained as an opera singer) is that it fell out of favor because microphone technology improved, making that stage accent irrelevant.

More on microphones:

If I may interject a history of technology moment here, the pronunciation may have had as much to do with microphone tolerances as it did with expectations about conformity or class. As I understand it, microphones did a poor job of recording certain sounds and sound combinations. Singers were frequently taught to move their head or body to accommodate. (Somehow I can't imagine Edward R. dancing in front of the microphone as he reported from London, and he certainly couldn't on TV.) A standardized pronunciation, along with an expected speaking pace , would increase listener comprehension.  By 1968, when we all wanted to do our own thing, recording devices had improved enough that the result wasn't a total disaster [at least acoustically].
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WWII did it:

It was the war; that's the short answer I think. Interesting to a Canadian that in the thirties the infamous 'Canadian "eh" ' was common in the US but disappeared from the excited states during the war. Also the broadcaster accents as in Murrow and Paul Harvey eg. blended into an amorphous and new 'army or fighter pilot talk' of the Texas variety. From a philosophical point of view it was the end of 'talking down' to the great unwashed.

A few more after the jump.

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It's been a few days since I wondered, on the basis of a fabulous pre-World War II film clip about San Francisco, why you never heard modern Americans speaking in the formal, stentorian tones so instantly recognizable from newsreels and movies of that era.


Since then, hypotheses and answers have flooded in. Here is a first installment. More to come.

From a reader in Canada, the accent died because it never really lived:

The reason it disappeared so quickly is that it wasn't a "real" accent. It didn't come from a particular place and it wasn't used by regular folk. It had to be invented and taught. So as soon as acting schools and elocution teachers stopped teaching it, it stopped being used. It would only take one generation.

I think the disappearance of this accent is a good sign -- a sign that North Americans have embraced their regionalisms and the richness and variety of their own true accents.

A similar thing has occurred in Canadian French. Something called "International French" (a completely artificial accent) was once the norm on radio and television. But now you only hear it in classical theatre.

It was fake, but it was based on something real:

I've been fascinated by this accent for years, and have known for a while that it was taught to actors and announcers in the 30s and 40s. But I do believe that it was based, at least in part, on a certain now-vanished Northeastern upper class diction.

I have lived in and around Hartford since the mid-70s and in the 90s attended an Episcopal church that drew a lot of its membership from the same old Hartford Yankee WASP milieu that produced the Hepburn family. I got to know a couple of smart and delightful older ladies who had actually grown up with "Katty," and I am telling you that they had That Accent. A bit softened around the edges, probably because it was so long out of style, but still fully recognizable.

More on fake and real languages:

The rapid disappearance of an artificial actors' accent is no surprise -- it was never part of the living language. What happened to it was Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and a more naturalistic style of acting. If you want a more surprising example from living language, listen to samples of the Queen of England back in the 50s and now.  She's definitely much less pinched and posh than she used to be.

P.S.  Katherine Hepburn's accent was more of a genuine east coast upper-class accent - learned at home, not in acting school. Thus it would sound closer to modern speech.

The Yankees did it:

I suppose that elocution finally passed from the everyday once Bob Sheppard ceased his work as PA announcer at Yankee Stadium.  Why is an interesting question.  Was it a shift toward a more "personable" voice?  Was it the replacement of newsreels with the small screen and the radio with images?  I wish I could remember more about the tone of the narrative voices at the NY World's Fair, but I wonder how much was brought on by a shift in the culture, how much by the medium.

It's like Shar-peis:

Didn't Cary Grant have some of this flavor? How about Gregory Peck? Were these the last living examples?

Of course an accent that exists only by dint of deliberate effort can vanish much more quickly than a "natural" one. How quickly would shar-peis go extinct if people did not take the trouble to breed them? I could imagine this accent falling out of favor during the 60's, when it would become identified with the unfashionable "establishment," as the Cary Grants and Gregory Pecks of the movies were yielding ground to the Jack Nicholsons and Robert Redfords.

Elvis did it:

I read something not long ago, I wish I could remember where, about how the rise of Elvis Presley was the beginning of the "Southernification" of American culture.  Watch almost any movie from the 40's that took place in present time  and the accents are of the same vein as the Transatlantic voice. I've always thought of it as a Philadelphia voice. Kate Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story "where are you from? South Bend?  Sounds like daancing." If you play Walter Cronkite in your head you can hear the same cadence as can be heard on this video, he's obviously less arch and his lower voice range eliminates some of the high edge but, his voicing is from the same ilk.
 
Elvis opened the door to a whole library of American culture that had not had a place in radio, movies or this new fangled thing called television.  As more and more Southern and Western raised talent gained success and a following  in the national culture, less formal speech became more acceptable to  the ear.  And, since there were many more people like Elvis in these great United States than there were people who spoke like Gayne Whitman the more casual, less affected voice quickly became an accepted norm.

It was because of method acting:

I bet that with the emergence of method acting as the de-facto acting technique in film and theatre around the early-mid 50's, the emotive accent of classical instruction (the transatlantic accent) was replaced with more lifelike accents as a matter of craft.
 
Just a theory!

It was the loss of poise and manners:

Americans stopped talking "this way" when poise and manners slid out of favor in the public media.  This coincided with the rise of cool and "irony."  If you made a graph of the decline and rise, I suspect the two lines -- the decline of fine speech and the rise of cool -- would mirror one another.  I bet the point where the two lines cross would mark the demise of stockings, men's hats and neckties. Since then we have all dressed (and behaved) more and more like children.  (I put "irony" in quotes because what passes for irony these days often has a large dollop of smugness as part of it, and true irony is not smug.)  Wearing a ballcap in church is not ironic.  It is rude.

So the next question is: what started the rise of cool and faux-irony?  I think it could probably be pegged to the arrival in our land of overabundance. When Americans stopped talking "this way,"  they stopped worrying about being presentable so they could get or keep their jobs. They no longer felt they had to be able to impress others with their maturity and knowledge and respectability.  It is hard to say which came first, the decline of manners or the slide in education and public intelligence.  But it seems certain to me that one leads to the other and the interaction of these two things fuels the downward spiral of our culture.

Teddy Kennedy illustrated the change:

Even though the announcer's accent was synthetic from the get-go, it's still true that national accents have changed radically since the 1940s.  You can easily see that if you stumble across a rerun of a show like "You Bet Your Life". Those common accents are now wondrous strange.

But to my mind, the most interesting example is from a single generation in a single family.  Listen to Ted Kennedy and compare him to his older brothers.  I lived in Boston from the 1970s until just a few years ago, and I never heard Jack's accent on anyone younger than 70.  It has vanished other than as an affect.  But Ted's accent changed with the times, and was pretty much lingua franca at the end of his life.

'I'm glad it's gone':

The first time I ever heard ['that' accent]  was when I caught William F Buckley on TV while channel surfing.

I had no idea who he was or why he was talking like that.  It sounded vaguely foreign and strange. But, it wasn't foreign in a way that I had ever encountered before.  Remember, I grew up in an immigrant family in SF and, in a typical day, I would hear Californian English, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakka, Japanese plus German and Latin in school.)

Then I read about how Hollywood imported British actors to lend some "class" to the movies. Then all sorts of broadcasters took on that affectation.

When I hear the accent, I think of it as a pale version of the confederate flag.  It says 'WASPS only.'

I am happy not to hear that accent any more.

More in the queue. Thanks for these varied and intelligent responses.

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The Atlantic's wonderful new Video Channel has a lot of great material, and it is invidious to point to any one offering rather than another. But this clip, "Wings Over the Golden Gate," which I started watching because of the irresistible aviation + California combo (I have flown over exactly the scenes shown here) got my attention for another reason. Watch for about 60 seconds and you'll see what I mean.



The language that the narrator, one Gayne Whitman, uses is florid enough. But his accent! It's instantly familiar to anyone who's seen old movies and newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s. But you cannot imagine a present-day American using it with a straight face. It's not faux-British, but it's a particular kind of lah-dee-dah American diction that at one time was very familiar and now has vanished. Margaret Dumont, in the Marx Brothers movies, was maybe the most familiar and caricatured female equivalent. Even Katharine Hepburn's very arch accent (eg in Philadelphia Story) seemed a step closer to "modern" American usage.

I wonder who the last person was who sounded this way. I wish someone still did. Maybe I'll try.
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Mystery solved, or much of it. I knew the accent but must have been the last person not to know its name. I had always thought that a "Transatlantic accent" was the faux-British frumpery I mention above. Unt-uh!  As reader P. Hoh says in a representative response:

The accent you are wondering about is the Transatlantic accent, also called the Midatlantic accent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English

This was not a regional accent. Rather, it's an accent that was taught to actors and announcers.

I learned about this accent from Amy Walker's "21 Accents" video on YouTube.
She starts using the Transatlantic accent at the 2:12 mark.

Glad I asked. But it still leaves the question of why it so totally fell out of fashion, and so fast. It's very hard for laymen to have a sense of how quickly accents changed in the past. Because there weren't movies and only a few recordings, we lack the vivid sense of how people actually sounded in the 19th century and before. But the total disappearance of what had been a prominent part of American public culture -- the formal lah-dee-dah tone -- in just a few decades is remarkable and must mean ... something.

If you're tuned into the VOA's Chinese service this morning at 9:30am EDT, check out my wife, Deborah Fallows, talking about her book Dreaming in Chinese.

She was going to be on for the full hour starting at 9:00, but she was bumped by (as the producer told her yesterday) a Living Buddha who is visiting DC along with the Dalai Lama.

And of course always bear in mind these words of caution, as reported in the Times of London several years ago:

 

I am away from bloggery for a while on other duties. In the meantime, words to live by, as a friend saw them today in Beijing:

This is insider-tech talk, but I think it is very interesting in its implications -- about language, "big data," Google's strategies, and the never-ending recalibration of goods vs bads, "signal to noise," on the internet.

[Brief summary of what follows: Google is dropping an automatic-translation tool, because overuse by spam-bloggers is flooding the internet with sloppily translated text, which in turn is making computerized translation even sloppier.]

There has been a rumble in the tech world about Google's announcement last month that it was "deprecating," and phasing out, its "Translate API." In simplest terms that means that website developers will no longer be able to use code that makes Google's translation algorithms automatically provide material for other sites. The standalone Google Translate site, which allows you to enter text or URLs for translation, will remain (along with some other features that apply Google translations to others' sites). But as an announcement on the Translate API site said:
 


For a very, very detailed explication of what this "economic burden" might mean for Google, check this analysis from the eMpTy Pages site on translation technology and related topics. Here is the part of the explanation that, for me, had the marvelous quality of being obvious -- once it's pointed out -- and interesting too:

The intriguing problem is the way that over-use of automatic translation can make it harder for automatic translation ever to improve, and may even be making it worse. As people in the business understand, computerized translation relies heavily on sheer statistical correlation. You take a huge chunk of text in one language; you compare it with a counterpart text in a different language; and you see which words and phrases match up. The computer doesn't have to "understand" either language for this to work. It just notices that the English words "good" or "goods" show up as bon in French in certain uses (ie, as in "opposite of bad"), but as a variety of other French words depending on the context in English -- "dry goods," "I've got the goods," "good grief," etc.

Crucially, this process depends on "big data" for its improvement. The more Rosetta stone-like side-by-side passages the system can compare, the more refined and reliable the correlations will become. Day by day and comparison by comparison, the translation will only get better. So that some day, in principle, we could understand anything written in any language, without knowing that language ourselves.