I went to the writing center on campus and printed Bawd Blue Cohosh, but was dissatisfied with the results. It was readable, but not without some difficulty. The imprecision of the printer yielded blurred words. Simply throwing all the paper away seemed a wasteful and uncreative solution, so I walked across to the library, climbed to the sixth level, the fiction floor, and left my unfinished manuscript at a study booth near a shelf stacked with books by Kafka. I hope it is discovered by and confuses a student, rather than discarded by a janitor.

The biggest motivator for me to learn German is to have the ability to read Kafka’s work as originally written. It would never approach all that I could understand if I spoke German natively, but it would potentially be better than reading the English translations. More generally, all translations irk me, especially when done by someone other than the author. I hesitate to get lost in a fictitious world when I know that it was tampered with from its original form by a person whose task was to build a bridge across two languages. Humans are imaginative and have depth, and our languages reflect that capacity. There is no one-to-one mapping for a word that has multiple meanings in one language and a single meaning in another.

I think translation would be a totally legitimate operation for use with robot languages, if they existed. I expect the first generation of robot languages will be flat and cold, void of any double-meaning punnery, consisting of bleeps and blips.

Which social experiment determined that people prefer machines speak to them in human-like voices and not in the voice chosen by Stephen Hawking? At the Fred Meyer self-service checkout counter we are faced with a juxtaposition: the voice of a professional, early 30s, and polite woman emanating from a box that houses a circuit board and barcode scanner. Her prompts to “please place the item in the bag” traverse through the cacophony of shoppers and into the ear of a human cashier, bubblegum-chewing sixteen-somethin with a pony tail. Does the sound of the robotic woman instill her with fear of outsourcing? No, of course not, and why should it? In fact, she would’ve preferred that the customers in her line had opted for self-service so that she could have gone on break early.