00:11
Hello, Len.
Hello, Asami.
So, welcome to part 2 of babel recap discussion.
And this time it is very spoiler-full.
So, if you have decided after listening to our part 1 and want to read it spoiler-free,
don't listen.
You know, or do.
We can't tell you what to do.
I mean, we cannot tell you what to do.
But if you wish to stay spoiler-free, you have been warned.
And now we can start.
So, we were like kind of talking about how one of the fascinating things about babel
is its sort of magic mechanism in this world, which I really like.
You know, I didn't love everything about this book, but this was one of the most
captivating things that kind of kept me going.
Because it's just, yeah, I don't think I've ever had or read any sci-fi or fantasy novels
whose magic is based on, one, an ability that we can see in real life, you know, not just
in the books.
Like, you know, we cannot like summon demons.
But like...
No, no, those come pre-packaged, depending on who you are.
Yeah, we can speak.
There are people who are like polyglots and like people who can speak multiple languages.
Like, they exist.
So, that part is real.
So, I like that.
And two, I liked that they didn't just say, oh, the more language you speak, the cooler
you are or like higher up in a magic level.
It's like the subtlety of how the magic works was more interesting to me.
Yep.
I think this comes along with the way that translation is treated in this book.
It's treated in a way that feels, as you were pointing out, like real and graspable, right?
It's not just, do you know the magic words that give you something?
It's not only do you know these words, do you understand that word?
And do you understand what that word carries?
Because even from like early chapters, and I think one of the quotes that I just swiped
by at this point was about how Robin, our main character here, or well, Robin as the
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name he took on, which we can get into, right?
Recognizes or begins to learn about this new place that he's in, right?
So when he's taken away from his hometown and he's dropped into, I forget the name
of the town, but essentially the West, somewhere in the UK, right?
London!
Just nevermind.
It's not important.
The point is, it's not important.
I didn't care at that point.
I don't care now.
Wasn't he in like a semi-rural area?
Like outside of London?
It wasn't in London, right?
I mean, like sure, it's a little, like, I think it was like Hartford or like something?
All right, you're going to make me go and figure out where he was in here.
Is that what the thing is?
Like, you know what?
No, I'm not going to do that.
It's not important.
The important bit that I was getting at is that he wanders around town and essentially
in the quote, he points out, as I learned the word, I learned more about the culture.
Like, so I gained something.
And then it sort of goes off on this, right?
Which sets a really nice background for the rest of the book in the way you've pointed
out that the word carries with it something else.
And you have to sort of like find that lived experience with it to really understand it.
And that's where you find the sort of relation, both the similarity and the difference between
words and phrases, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So just as a spoiler, so Robin, along with a few other main characters, are inducted
into Babel, the Royal Translation Institute of this hypothetical fictional Oxford back
in like sometime in 19th century, I think, something like that.
And the entire, like the reason why this is such an elite institution is because the
magic in this world, which works by having some etchings onto silver bar is like done
through translation and how it works.
I mean, if you're listening to this, hopefully you've read it.
But like, it's basically a person who is executing the magic has to be fluent in this
two match pairs, like word pairings, quote unquote, translations, right?
And of the two words and the subtle differences between the two words, the connotation it
holds and cultural nuances that comes in play, the bigger the difference, the stronger the
magic.
And the entire people at the Royal Institute is like, they're all crazy fluent in multiple
06:02
languages.
And they try to exploit that subtle differences between the languages, between two languages
to and come up with clever pairings of this and try and pair them in such a way that would
do all sorts of enhancement work to the technologies that exist in this world.
Right.
And yeah.
There's, I think, an important bit that I might want to isolate here, which is that difference.
It's not even just the difference.
It's essentially like this.
It's the way that these words can like overlap, right?
In meaning.
Like they have to be close enough that they are rooted together, but then they have to be
like separate enough that there is, I think the book calls it like a distortion or like
some sort of iteration between the two.
And that distortion, that missing piece for one of the words is essentially the magic
outcome, right?
Which is crazy to imagine how you'd have to hold such complexity around those words in
order to use them and to invoke them, right?
To actually activate them.
It requires you to be right behind it.
So.
So Robin, our main character sort of has like an inherent advantage because his language,
Cantonese or Mandarin, I guess in this case, he's from Canton.
So technically Cantonese, but I don't think they show.
They address that later.
They address it later, how he's able to like understand when he goes back.
Yeah.
But he can't communicate any longer in Cantonese.
And so he's like held on to this.
Did he say that?
It's when he goes into the opium den and bounces out.
There's like a bit of like inner monologue stuff that happens.
I believe there's the way that I interpreted it with the challenge he was having was that
there was like some difficulty in that space.
Because I think there was, there was, but I didn't think it was Mandarin Cantonese.
I think he talks to the general in.
I thought it was in Mandarin.
I'd have to go and find it.
It would make sense for him to talk to the general in Mandarin because that's more widely
spoken.
But then when he went out into the town, I think that disconnect was the struggle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I guess like while he is in London slash Oxford, he only really had Mandarin speaker
who is the professor level.
Yes.
So it's possible that his Cantonese is a little rusty at that point.
Right.
Maybe that's a detail I didn't pick up.
But back to translation though.
So I really like that.
09:04
Yeah.
That distortion, that the gap, the ultimate untranslatable part that exists in no matter
how good you become a translation, that difference is the source of this magic.
I really like that because if anything, I always thought of that as like an interesting,
interesting, but often inconvenient difference, inconvenient fact.
The fact that you cannot translate 100%, just like you cannot transmit energy 100%.
There's a loss inevitably in that process.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, sometimes it's interesting, but I think more often than not, it appears in everyone's
daily lives is like a slight inconvenience.
So I loved that Kwan focused on this gap and the fact that you have a gap being the knowledge
and being.
And yeah, but there has to be some overlap.
Like there has to be.
And in order for the match pair to work, so that the fine balance and ultimately it's up to
the performer of this magic, the people at the Bible to infuse
sort of the specific meaning and specific amount of differences, therefore, because I'm trying to
pick up a quote here.
Give me a second.
Sure.
Yeah.
So it says, you do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head
at once.
You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine transfer,
traversing them.
Does that make sense?
Like, that's one of the quotes.
Yeah.
And I highlighted that because that thing, that feeling of being in the intersection of the two
worlds, I think I have found myself in that space, not just linguistically, but culturally,
maybe even doing the kind of research that I'm doing.
I'm in a very interdisciplinary field and like being able to hold kind of both truths at the
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same time is like, I feel like I've got a pretty good training on this and I'm just like, feel so
validated that that's the source of magic in this world.
Are you saying that this book was in fact a power fantasy written for you, Asami?
Is this the...
It was the power fantasy that I didn't know I had.
You didn't know you had nor that you needed.
This was, this is like a charge.
Yeah.
Basically, I'm a magician.
Yeah.
I can use magic.
It's what Babel taught me.
Yeah.
No, I think that's a clear and totally fine takeaway.
But yeah, like I love that it's like, yeah, it's that specific, usually inconvenient fact
that kind of becomes a power in this book.
I'm not sure if the book addresses this in a way, but there's something about how when
learning a language, there's recognition that you're going to be like adding this, you know,
other nexus of ideas kind of alongside your already pre-existing one.
And there is a lot that can get in the way of that really working and of that like coming
to fruition.
And this, the book, I guess, touches on these in the lens of this is why the colonial powers
attempt to manipulate and take children from their place, right?
And put them somewhere else, because then you can have the benefit of both worlds sort
of idea.
But if you don't do that, right?
And you are attempting to create more nuance and option and agency amongst people, then
it obviously can become harder and not as perfect, you know, or you have like Professor,
who was the one who really liked violent explosive weaponry?
The first one, Professor P?
He starts with a P, maybe.
Uh, I know, I know.
You know what I'm talking about.
Yeah.
Yes.
I think he talks a little bit about like, maybe it was him, could have been somebody
else, this idea of like, if they were to try to pick up a language at a certain point,
it takes them, you know, decades, and they're able to grasp, like, finally to hold a lot
of the meanings around them.
But they just won't be able to catch all of those under intricacies that you would
otherwise have at the beginning, right?
Yeah.
And I think there's a quote that I picked up that talks about that, if they let me.
So it says, like, this is when they're still learning about the silver work magic mechanism.
15:01
It says, you need to be able to think in a language to live and breathe it, not just
recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page.
And that's another element of this magic mechanism that I like about this book.
Because, you know, being able to, like, pick a word that means the same thing, or mostly
the same thing.
Yes.
People who study really hard can do it.
And I feel like now AIs can do it also.
Look, we're not going to get into the AI topic in this one here.
Yes.
Not yet, because it's going to be like a two-hour podcast if we do that.
Yeah, I won't stop talking.
Just as a little tiny AI detour.
Let me do that.
All right.
Tiny detour.
That was another sort of validation for me, because I've read, I've seen a Twitter post
by somebody who was saying, like, you know, large language models do a pretty good job
translating.
I feel like, as the poster is a scientist, and he's like, you know, I, as a scientist
who spent many years becoming good at English, feels a little bit like my weapon is being
robbed from me.
Because, you know, this is a skill I put a lot of money and effort to acquire.
And now, you know, even though that's not the main weapon, right?
Like, the main weapon for him is his scientific talent.
But, like, this being able to speak and, you know, manipulate English well, was what sort
of gave him an edge as a Japanese scientist.
And now he feels like he's been robbed off of that a little bit.
And he's like, I don't know how to reconcile with that.
And I feel like this is the answer.
This, the fact that you need to live and breathe in it, and not just recognize it as a smattering
of letters on a page.
Recognizing it as a smattering of letters on a page is what AI is doing, right?
And it's not even, like, it's not even that.
It's just, like, some vectorized idea of, like, words that they have enough cosine similarity
that they can put it together, and they've been trained to put them together.
So they will spit it out if being prompted by one.
And it's, like, that's what they can do.
But, like, people who put a lot of hard work in, and effort in, and time in, they can live
and breathe that language.
Like, not just recognize it as a one-to-one translation.
18:00
And that richness, it might look extraneous.
It might look like you don't really need it on a daily basis.
But, like, that richness that comes from being able to inhabit in these two linguistic worlds,
I think is indispensable.
It's priceless.
So if, who was it?
I'm pretty sure it was PodScientist-san.
If he is listening up until this far, that's my answer to it.
It's, like, you know how to live and breathe in language, in English and Japanese, and
maybe more.
I don't know what else he's fluent in.
And that's something AIs cannot do.
And, you know, only from living and breathing in these kind of two different worlds, you
come up with a specific kind of perspective, ideas, experience, things like that.
That the magic only happens when you put the effort to be able to do that.
And I don't know, that felt like a validation for me, too.
Because, you know, I'm not gonna lie, being a Japanese and being able to speak English
pays me, you know.
If I'm not picky, I can make a lot of money.
I'm not gonna lie and say that this isn't a weapon for me.
It's a huge, like, it's an edge that I can have, that I put work in to be able to do
that.
If people are unaware of the richness that they're not accessing, it's very easy to
just be like, well, why bother learning new language?
AIs can do it well.
Like, sure, they can.
And you can choose to live in that world.
But there is a whole nother richness that's available to you that you don't even know
if you don't put the effort in.
Yeah.
There is so much there that I think is really important that you've just covered.
This response that you've given, I think, is really cleverly and clearly done.
Because the tendency for people to perhaps see a tool that can, let's say, in the
translation case specifically, take words and map them to something in the other language,
which, in fact, is a good, say, approximation, translation of the text, right?
This is not the first time I have heard this, right?
That a translator specifically who has done it for decades has voiced, like, as far as
a first pass on stuff goes, really, it is a notable improvement from these things, right?
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This is something that, mechanically speaking, covers that.
But with sort of a big exception category here, you bring up at the end of your sort
of message that there is something missing.
Well, you had this throughout your whole message.
But if you're not aware of the thing that's missing, or if maybe in these cases, if a
document doesn't require that nuance, right?
If there's a communication that is simply, if nobody's caring what's involved there,
well, then, of course, something like a computerized automated process seems to fill
the role.
Because it probably didn't have much purpose or connection to the depth and breadth
of the human and culture that would otherwise be added to the process, right?
So, like, the really, I think the really important and crucial things which, to wrap it
back to Babel, Babel does try to get at is the human behind kind of the act, the job,
the role, the position.
It's, you know, the wonder and the progress and the creation doesn't come from the
efficiency and quickness of the communication.
It comes from bringing in the wealth of experiences into that space and the differences
behind things and the people communicating with each other, not necessarily, you know,
in a very rigid way.
And if we're to push it another step further, maybe, you know, if everybody's kind of
speaking in their own language and this one thing does the, like, conversion between
them, that goes back to the first point, how no matter what you do in a translation, you're
always going to have distortion.
So, the distortion is just one particular kind of distortion every time now, right?
Or you add random mathematical variants to it, which all of these things have an approximation
quality.
This idea of mapping things, like large language models don't do a one-to-one mapping,
which was closer to, like, the original Google Translate.
And they have these, as you said, cosines of spaces into, which is interesting and intellectually
stimulating to think about how words are related to each other within a space.
But that nuance isn't important and isn't necessarily considered unless you're the
person living the experience, right?
Like, that's...
Yeah.
Put it short, AI models don't know the meaning of the word.
No, there's no knowing.
They know how it's usually packaged in.
They know what usually comes before, what usually comes after.
They also can learn a crazy number of patterns of how they typically appear in written or
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spoken languages.
Yeah.
And they can do amazing things with that.
But ultimately, they don't know.
So, like, if you have a chat GPT speak to this silver bar, it's not going to do anything.
No.
Oh, no, no, no.
Yeah.
If we go back into Babel, no, no, absolutely not.
Yeah.
According to the mechanics of Babel, having Alexa talk to a silver bar and speak the match
pairs in perfect pronunciation isn't going to start the magic because they don't hold
these two worlds.
They don't have the understanding of the richness of being able to hold these multiple worlds
at the same time.
Yeah.
And that, to me, is a good enough reason to learn a new language.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's a good enough reason just to kind of even there are limitations in learning
and hurdles and strategies and all this other stuff that come into play here.
But you don't have to learn the language.
You shouldn't necessarily just be like, oh, I picked up the alphabet and now I know Japanese.
Don't do that.
Right?
Don't conflate the idea of like learning a bit of a language and having knowledge or
mastery of the language.
But you can pick up a little and recognize that that is what you know.
Right?
And that it tells you something.
Yes, yes, yes.
And that maybe there's more.
Right?
The idea that, you know, even at the beginning, hiragana and katakana exist.
That is, in fact, knowledge that tells you something.
Right?
That like you're...
It's like you just gained a new dimension into alphabets.
And you didn't know.
And it's like, well, why?
And then the questions are, why are there two of them?
Right?
And like you learned something.
I'm not going to answer it.
Okay.
I mean, like, you know, you can come up with reasons for the answer, though.
Right?
Like the idea of there is a separate alphabet that tends to be used for things that are loaned
or has been co-opted.
Right?
The culture has taken parts to use it in different ways, such as for onomatopoeias.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I love that you brought it up.
But also, like, when you are putting the effort to learn a new language, like to actively try to
gain this new dimension in your thinking, your, you know, brain space.
Perfection is not necessary.
Right.
There's always going to be people who are more fluent than you, or, you know, more skilled
than you in translation.
But what matters is that it enhances your livid experience of, like, your day-to-day
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life, being able to, like, kind of switch different dimensions, live in two worlds.
And to me, like, the level of mastery is not a factor that would, like, that isn't, that's
not a necessity to experience this level of richness.
Yeah.
It's really more about engagement and, like, knowing that there's always more to learn
and willing to do that.
Right.
That's far more important than, you know, whatever perfection looks like to you.
Yeah, right.
And we, everybody's got a variant of how hung up they get up on those things.
I think the best advice there is, like, go into it with, maybe, this is an American saying,
you know, like, a humble pie.
Don't forget your humble pie.
It's, like, just basically, like, remember that you don't know things yet.
Yeah, I feel like more people should be reminded of that more often.
Yeah, they should probably be eating humble and empathy-related pie, and specifically
in certain places right now.
Yeah, new bakery ideas.
New bakery ideas.
Yeah, selling humble pie.
If you tip us, we'll throw it at you.
So, anyway, yeah, that, I think there's this.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening, and find us on X at Ego de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time!
