In praise of janky translations: an anti-google diatribe

Once upon a time as recently as yesterday, I lived in a world in which Google Translate was an imperfect but useful tool. I could ask it my best guess of what someone had said to me, and it would spit out a decent explantion of what we were talking about. I could point my phone camera at a wall-label in a museum, and out would come the information I was reading about in a language I can speak. This all was incredibly useful, particularly on my Asian trip last summer.

Another thing I happened to use Google Translate for was as a short-cut in my research. Now, I’ve been trained up with the best of them. I know that looking at the original language of, say, a medieval charter is the best and most accurate way to understand that document’s meaning. Nevertheless, when working at volume, it can be handy to skim, and while I can get in the groove with modern German, my medieval Alemannic dialect reading is slower-paced. If I want a really fast assessment of something, there’s nothing like my native tongue, which is English, as you’ve probably guessed by now.

So, when looking over the roughly 200 charters relevant to the current chapter, I’ve been going through them quickly via google translate to see if there’s utility in doing the close-up work of line-by-line and word-by-word reading. About one out of every 5 will have a topic of particular interest. I can skim a 69-line whole-side-of-a-cow sized parchment charter in its janky English translation in about 10 minutes. I can read said document directly in something more like 45 minutes.

Let’s think about the math:

• To skim English: 10x200 = 2,000 minutes, or roughly 30 hours of reading.
• To read medieval Alemannic: 45x200=9,000, or roughly 150 hours of reading

Okay, I’ll even be fair; add back another 20 hours for going through the targeted documents in detail and I’m still looking at the difference between 50 hours of work and 150 hours of work.

Why am I heated up about this topic? Well, they broke google translate last night.

Let me say that again, with all the feels:

THEY BROKE GOOGLE TRANSLATE LAST NIGHT.

I have receipts, of course. I’m going to share just one, because it’s been a long and stressful day this morning (bwahaha).

Here’s a clause out of one of my documents:

3. brieff Alsz dann der vorgemelt keb hailig Santgall unnser hußsatter Jarlichen ain Suma gebt Im den vigrechten der gestifften Jorlichen Jarzeten

Here’s its translation, as of yesterday:

3. Furthermore, the aforementioned abbey of Saint Gall, our patron, shall pay annually a sum to the vicar for the proper observance of the established annual memorial services.

Usable, right? Tells me the basics of what’s going on. Is it elegant? No. Is it fully accurate? Also no. It is, I think we’d all agree, a janky translation. (Oxford definition of janky: “of extremely poor or unreliable quality.”).

But here’s the thing: this janky translation is USABLE. It tells me whether or not this is a place I want to spend some of my precious minutes. I mean, I like down time just like everyone else; these translations are a shortcut!

But no, it wasn’t getting enough time-on-the-page, I guess, so Google “improved” (and I use that word with scare quotes for a reason, so be scared, be very very scared) its translation tool. Let’s look at the result, shall we?

3. When the aforementioned [name omitted], the [name omitted], gives our [name omitted] an annual sum in accordance with the established annual [terms omitted].

This is predictive technology gone bad. The AI underpinning here is obvious. The “improved” tool is happy to predict anything that’s sort of standard in a regular document of this type. But all, all, ALL of the interesting details are now redacted. Because names, and places, and specific amounts of money are NOT predictable. So I guess we shouldn’t need to see them, eh? Because everything useful in life is predictable. (Mad, me mad? Whatever do you mean???)

And this, this is what they’re calling the “classic” version of the tool. Not that it bears any resemblance to what the tool was doing yesterday, of course. But it’s a handy marketing ploy for a company that clearly Does Not Give A Shit about the user experience. The advanced version, well, it simply redacted lines 6 to 9 of my document altogether since those are just like line 5, a list of payments to particular chaplains.

But MY study is looking (in part) at exactly that. I need to know how much more the parish priest gets than the altarist at the St Mang altar. It’s part of my evidence. And it changes over time. Oh, which makes it unpredictable.

So when we premise translations on what words mean, we get one kind of information. Yesterday, I might argue with whether the “Mesner” was better translated as a “sacristan” or a “sexton.”

In the land of predictive AI, however, we premise translations on what other texts think might come next, and that means skipping the “minutiae.” The result? I can no longer tell from the translation that the Mesner, whatever his role might be, was even present in the document. A bad translation is something I can argue with; a predictive omission is something I can’t even see.

This is arguably great if you’re translating prose. It’s an absolute disaster if you’re looking at legal records and payments and guidelines for the foundations. Those kinds of documents are actually designed to deliver the very small, unpredictable details that AI wants to suppress. They are accounting devices, legal instruments, and memory machines. It’s like AI trying to tell you what flavor of icecream is your favorite based on other people’s orders. It has absolutely, positively no idea of what *you* might want, but that won’t stop it trying, using that oh-so-confident voice, though.

Janky, bad translations, in other words, are part of my world of work. They have a use. They may be inelegant, but their very bumps and hiccups are pointers to the curious oddity. They keep the text visible as a text. As a user, I still see names, sums, offices, altars, weird textual repetitions – the very things that are likely innovations in this particular textual example. Predictive smoothing, by contrast, is a lie of fluency. It gives you the shape of a charter without its substance. To put it another way, jankiness is epistemologically honest. It doesn’t pretend to understand more than it does.

Cory Doctorow has brought us the concept of “enshittification,” the reality that a captured audience is merely monetary potential to the big firms that think they own our data. And yes, this update is truly, truly, truly the enshittified version of what a translator is supposed to do. In fact, from where I’m sitting, this is not even translation anymore. It’s instead content abstraction masquerading as translation. A translator is accountable to the source text; a predictive model is accountable to statistical plausibility. In fact, I have trouble communicating just how BAD it is at the job it was perfectly adquate at yesterday, but you get the general gist.

And the reality is that an enshittified product is pretty much what you’re stuck with from here on out, unless Google changes its mind, and rolls back to yesterday’s model.

Happily for me, I can, in fact, read my texts. I have access to good dictionaries, and I do subscribe to DeepL for toggling languages with modern German. (DeepL struggles *hard* with Alemannic, but then, don’t we all?). And in a pinch, ChatGPT actuall does a decent job with the odd sentence or two.

But the fact that yesterday was easy, and today my tool is broken? This is the way of this tech-heavy world of ours. Because yesterday’s Google Translate assumed that you were the expert deciding what mattered. Today’s assumes the model knows better. That’s not just frustrating; it’s a quiet and very, very creepy reordering of authority in knowledge production. Scholars of thin archives (like the ones I work on in Bregenz, Austria and in Bischofszell, Switzerland) are exactly the ones who lose when the world (or the tech-companies) decides that unpredictability is noise. Because the unpredictable is often where the truth lies.

Academic Games

For today’s post, to be clear, my role is amplifier first, and commentator second.

In case you wondered what academics do for fun, well, sometimes we weird out in corners of academia. This winter's winner from where I'm sitting is the 200-page published review of a 145-page book. No, that's not a typo; the review is longer than the book.

And the thing is, the writing of the review is just so, so, so quotably bad that my colleagues have turned it into a game. You scroll through the review and drop in at random and read a sentence or two, and decide if it's quoteworthy. And the joy of the game is that everyone's a winner. (There's a variant with extra points if your quote contains the word "epistemic" which appears 150 times in the review. And wow, the footnotes too! The whole thing is delicious!)

Credit to @jameschalmers.bsky.social and @benstanley.eu for drawing both review and game to my attention.

So, I have to admit that I delighted in this game. First of all, a review, as a matter of courtesy, should not be more than about 2% of the length of the item reviewed. Okay, maybe 5%. It’s pretty simple math: 300 page book at 5%: you can write a 15 page review if you’re completely nerding out. But that’s your upper limit. After that, you’re just in it for the kicks. And more kicks. Perhaps this meme could be instructive:

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/540658-beating-a-dead-horse

It gave me all the feels – like watching a senior professor take the time to systematically destroy a graduate student in public during Q&A. (You know who I mean.) The world has no need for that; it’s neither instructive nor helpful nor even, at the end of the day, a boon to the human race. In fact, it’s kinda nasty. I’m glad that such behavior is generally condemned in the venues I’m involved in today; I wonder if the Comp-Law field might also have some things to observe about this piece, and suspect that it does.

And one of the reasons I don’t mind poking fun is that there’s hierarchy at play here as well; senior professor at the Sorbonne reviews book by scholars he characterizes as “unencumbered by reputation” (p.242). Well, refer to the meme above; you’ve already won that competition. Have some compassion.

But while compassion is in short supply, the game of quotability is over-amply supplied. In even a brief selection, Legrand demonstrates a series of writing quirks. I know that Comparative Law (and law in general for that matter) likes its literary flourishes. But these are, um, is “recklessly ornate” a fair assessment? You be the judge.

Start with over-the top image:

“even the kudzu-like proliferating orthodoxy that does not yet see retains the power of sight potentially allowing it to outsoar the darkness of not-seeing” (p.437)

Be proud of me, I did NOT ask Gemini to make me an image of Kudzu with eyes. Yikes.

We move on to over-the-top vocabulary:

“As rationality finds itself being relativized — the estimation of plurality must be a key factor in the comparatist’s allegiance to foreignness — comparison structurally invites conflict, no appeal to contrived and evanescent overarching commonalities being in a position to overcome the constitutive comparative dissensus” (p.428)

Relativized >>> evanescent >>> dissensus: the heat-o-meter just keeps rising as the sentence grows.

And, of course, there’s over-the-top sentence-building. Stop me when I get to a period?

“This review is not the proper locus to assess the merits or demerits of ‘tradition’ at any length although I am minded to specify that I consider Glenn’s move from ‘system’ to ‘tradition’ as largely cosmetic, a variation on the theme of David’s historically overarching model that remains deeply ingrained within orthodox comparative law’s ways generally and within the civil law’s manner in particular — which is why my preference easily goes to culture, a decisively more rewarding heuristic (tradition and possibly system, in the broadest sense of the term, being better apprehended as cultural subsets).” (p. 297)

Whew.

So, there’s a lot not to like. This review certainly wins some kind of academic Bulwer-Lytton prize, but for academia.

Why, oh why, do you think the editors of the journal chose to publish this? I suspect them of actually being kind of clever. Rarely do issues of comparative law make it into my headspace. After all, I’m a musicologist and a monastic historian, and I tend to dabble more in genre fiction than, er, comparative law. Yet as a non-expert outsider, I delighted in the inanities here, and was equally delighted by the community of scholars which came out to play with the materials.

There’s a sense of fun in being able to poke at such clearly contrived sentiments as those expressed here – and yes, to play a little bit of “I’ve read that, I have heard of this other thing, and oh, that could actually be interesting” with its footnotes. And, it’s low stakes – a chance to deal out an easy “my writing might be bad, but it’s certainly not THAT bad” card at the end of a long semester. Plus, we academics enjoy performative overwriting and disciplinary in-jokes, and this review provides a rare playground for exploring a bit of both elements.

So, you can chalk it up to "people being weird on the internet" or to modern-day publishing being a fool’s game. But now you know what at least some academics do for fun on their "time off."

Legrand, Pierre. "Comparative Law’s Shallows and Hollows: A Negative Critique on Ablepsy" [Review of Sabrina Ragone and Guido Smorto. Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023. 145 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 289339 0]. The Journal of Comparative Law 22 (2025): 239-439. https://www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFiles/JCL_20-2_01_Legrand_ComparativeLawsShallowsAndHallows.pdf

The Silent Office Hour

Administration wants to encourage faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom, so they require the faculty to spend two hours on drop-in office hours a week.

Bwahaha.

Ask any faculty member, and I’ll bet you’ll find they agree with me. Office hours are the perfect time to submit travel receipts, catch up on paperwork, and take care of email. They’re just a terrible time to expect to see students.

Because students almost never come. Too far. Wrong time. Too nervous. No identified questions.

After all, who has questions before lunchtime? Questions are a nighttime activity. You know, after the faculty have already left campus.

If administration wanted to support genuine interaction between faculty and students, they would require things like:

1) Mandatory concert atttendance – and the wonderful chit-chat afterwards when we’ve all been moved to laughter or chills by the music in all its performative glory

2) Mandatory shared setup time. Before class even starts, when the projector’s misbehaving and I’m untangling cables, students drift in and talk about what they’re listening to, what’s happening in the world of campus and beyond, or whatever else is on their mind. No grade pressure, no formalities – just human contact with a purpose dangling from a HDMI cord.

3) Mandatory packing-up time. There’s nothing like unplugging the laptop from its station to bring on a host of quick one-off questions from students. (Some days I cynically wonder if more productive learning happens when I’m packing up than actually happened during discussion – there’s a lot of “aha” in those quick exchanges)

4) Mandatory text capacity. No, I don’t give out my phone number to students – but I do have students use a walkie-talkie app. They can leave voice or text messages; I can respond asynchronously, again, by voice or by text. This for me takes about 2 or 3 hours a week, since these can become extended conversational exchanges. (Please please please don’t tell me about the messaging app in your LMS. I live on a farm, with all the absent internet that comes with that. The walkie-talkie app takes two pennies; the LMS feed takes two dollars. Let’s stick with ‘Can I receive and respond?’ as our measure of tech success.)

5) Mandatory coffee fetching. When I’m in my office, I can feel lonely. Head out to get a cup of coffee from the lounge, and I inevitably bump into one or more students, and those conversations can be rich, deep, and meaningful. Those usually aren’t about course content – they’re about the discipline, life experiences, and our place in the world. You know, the stuff that carries forward in a forever kind of way.

6) Mandatory “big deadlines.” There’s nothing like a deadline to clarify what could use some support. And the problem with office hours is it is not only the wrong time for interactions, but it’s the wrong space, too. Better solutions come in the library, or in the hallway outside the restrooms (we’re just being honest here), or on the sidewalk between one space and another.

See, the problem with office hours is the office. It’s not that setting aside time for 1:1 with students is a bad idea – in fact, it’s one of the most valuable aspects of a college education. And it’s not that students don’t prize their access and the support it affords. They genuinely do respond to faculty who care.

It’s the whole idea that you can take all the ideals of academia, and put them in a box (the office) and on the clock (at a reasonable time of day). Real learning isn’t like that. Ideating and interaction both happen at their best on the spontaneous edges of other kinds of activities.

And spontaneity can’t be mandated.

But it can be invited to appear.

True Confessions: Here’s my shout-out to the real and impactful student moments—the ones that happen in the dining hall, the hallway after class, or occasionally (miracle of miracles) in my office. They're real. I just wish the last kind happened more often. And I’m not alone.