Proust-posting 2

Can ChatGPT Produce a Version of Proust Worth Reading? Bryan Charles wades into the world of computer-assisted translation.

…I was immersed in my Proust studies, comparing the different translations, reading the Oxford version as each volume came out. And while not a daily consideration, it is true that I saw the world I was lost in, the historical periods of the novel, of course, but also the very act of reading it, savoring sentences that demanded one’s full attention, that could not be raced through, and the encyclopedic information many of the dense paragraphs contained—I believed all of this to be, apropos of the novel’s themes, occurring outside of time somehow, untouched by contemporary grotesqueries, the imperatives toward automated summary and speed. I had interviewed Charlotte Mandell, whose translation of volume two of the Oxford Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, moved me greatly, and asked if she felt threatened by machine translation. She did not. “No AI thing will ever be able to translate Proust,” she said.

And now an AI thing—or, I guess, multiple AI things under the rubric of a frictionless, all-in-one “translator’s assistant”—had helped to translate Proust.