Howard Hibbett on Tanizaki Jun'ichiro:
In his speech, Hibbett mentions having problems with translating Japanese titles so he ended up taking a few liberties with them, which I found to be both strange yet understandable. For instance, he mentioned that he translated Aoi Hana, into Aguri, instead of the expected The Blue Flower. Contrastingly, I do understand why he would do this -- maybe not for this specific example, but for other pieces, because having translating a few titles in class myself (mainly the Newspaper/Magazine articles), I noticed that Japanese titles tend to sound unnatural when translated literally. Later on in the text, Hibbett recalls consulting his friends about matters in the source text which he did not quite understand, and receiving five different answers from five different people. When I read this, I instantly wondered if Hibbett would have used open source A.I.s such as ChatGPT or Bard to generate hundreds of responses to receive lots of unique feedback and opinions if they had existed back then. If so, in this regard, I could see why A.I. could be useful for translation; a tool for getting translators to think more and consider different approaches, rather than a tool to directly assist translators with the translation process -- how it is could be abused as a machine instead.
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