Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 164 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Bo Balder is the first Dutch author to have been published in Clarkesworld and F&SF. Her short fiction has also appeared in Escape Pod and other places. Her SF novel The Wan was recently published by Pink Narcissus Press.

The Language Sheath

Regina Kanyu Wang, translated by Emily Jin and Regina Kanyu Wang

1

Shall I go ahead? The recorder is on? All right, let me begin.

My name is Ilsa. I’m honored to have this job, acting as the sole sampling subject for Babel’s planned Kemorean language sheath. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised that they chose me. Let’s just say that I knew I would get it. You may not notice if you don’t speak Kemorean and can hear me only through translation, but years of experience as a KSL teacher forced me to adopt good habits: standard pronunciation, strict grammar, meticulous attention to usage and good style—after all, only a teacher who speaks flawless Kemorean can teach students properly. I’ve won the award for teaching excellence five years in a row, been extensively interviewed by the media, and even got to shake the hand of the Kemorean Minister of Culture. My teaching skill is as lauded as the elegance of my Kemorean. Babel is wise to choose me, the ideal candidate.

I have a good impression of Babel, whose global success is well-known. All the Babel staff I met through the multiple rounds of interviews were professional and friendly. In the last round, I had a very agreeable chat with Mr. Hanson, director of Babel’s Kemorean Project. Although he was speaking German and I was speaking Kemorean, with the help of Babel’s translation service, we understood each other pretty well. Babel’s earbuds transmitted each of our sentences up to the cloud service center, and the translations produced by the neural engine were then transmitted to the other person’s earbuds in real time.

For big languages such as Mandarin, English, German, Spanish, and over forty others, Babel’s translation service has performed extremely well, but the Kemorean translation that I heard during the interview process, an internal demo not available to the general public, was only passable. It generally conveyed the meaning of the words accurately, but the sentences were stilted, awkward, with little stylistic unity or natural fluency in expression. It so grated on the ear that I couldn’t imagine anyone would be willing to pay to use it for long. Babel hasn’t launched the Kemorean service because in its present form the product would ruin Babel’s reputation. They need to refine and polish the machine translation results with usage patterns distilled from a real human model speaker, to wrap the rough functional core in a smooth output filter called a “language sheath.” That’s why they need me.

At first, I didn’t realize that Babel was recruiting for a model for the Kemorean language sheath—I had never heard of the concept. I thought I was supposed to participate in the translation process itself. Having taught Kemorean for more than a decade, I thought my deep knowledge of grammar would be helpful.

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