[lbo-talk] Re: Sounds like Faulkner

Michael Simkin simkin_michael at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 17 16:13:48 PDT 2003



> That's an artifact of your breaking it up into individual sentences, which
> are not large enough units to express what is good in Faulkner, or in any
> other novelist.

Try to do this trick with Nabokov's prose.

An interesting observation is that machine translation does indeed resemble Faulkner.

When I wrote the quiz I anticipated that people would get 3-4 questions wrong. It turned out that most get 3-4 right. Though similarity between machine translation and Faulkner is more than both being merely grammatically incorrect, there is enough difference to distinguish them. So I was surprised. (However some people scored 92% and 100%)


> Remove
> enough context and you remove most of the meaning of things. Remove
> enough distinctive meaning from two different things and yes, you can make
> them look alike.

I don't see much meaning in Faulkner. Although he is a master in creating some (miserable) mood.


> Give Faulkner fans a chapter of Faulkner, and a chapter of your machine
> translation, and they'll not only be able to tell the difference between
> them, they'll be able to explain to you what it was about the writing in
> the chapter they admire.

And if I in addition Identify the author of each quotation the fans will do even better.

Sometime in 1930's Mozafer Sherif conducted following experiment. First he asked the subjects to rank ten different authors. Than he gave them what he told were excerpts from those authors and asked to rank those excerpts. In reality all of the excerpts were from one author, Stevenson. You know the rest.

Mikhail Simkin --- http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin/



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