When a single word can express two different things or concepts we no longer speak of synonymity but rather of homonymy. We have synonymity when two terms both refer to the same thing or concept, but we have homonymy when a single term refers to two different things or concepts.
If a lexicon contained only synonyms (and if synonymity was an unambiguous concept), then translation would be possible, even for AltaVista. If in the same lexicon there are many homonyms then translation becomes a discombobulating job.
I know that the notion of meaning is a very complicated one and I would like to avoid it. Let me assume that what we naively call the meaning of a word is everything in a dictionary (or better, an encyclopaedia) that is written in the corresponding entry for that word.
Every single thing written in that entry is part of the content expressed by that word. If we read the content of a given entry we realise that (a) it includes many accepted meanings or senses (the case of the word work is a very clear example), and (b) these senses are not always expressed by an alleged synonym but by a definition, a paraphrase or a concrete example. In this sense a dictionary provides a series of interpretations for a given word, or, according to Charles Sanders Peirce,2 of interpretants of that sign.
For Peirce, an interpretant is another representation which refers to the same ‘object’. In order to tell the content of an expression (be it verbal or other) we must substitute the first expression with another expression (or string of expressions), which in its turn can be interpreted by another expression (or string of expressions).
An interpretant can be a synonym (in those rare cases in which one can believe in synonymity, as happens with husband, mari, marito); a sign from another semiotic system (the word work can be interpreted by showing the photograph of an engineering structure); a given object which is shown as representative of the class to which it belongs (one can interpret the word work by indicating a real engineering structure); a definition; a description; a paraphrase; or a complex discourse that inferentially develops all the logical possibilities implied by the content of the expression. For instance, if one takes into account that there is something in common between the various senses of work, since a literary masterpiece, a bridge, a factory, and a painting are all artificial objects made by human beings by virtue of an activity or labour, and that the same senses are conveyed by the Latin word opus, then even this complex inference is an interpretant of the expression work.
Certainly a dictionary (as a concrete object sold in bookstores) does not provide all the possible interpretants of a given linguistic term – this is the job of an ideal encyclopaedia. But even a dictionary at least tries to circumscribe the sense that a given term assumes in the more frequently recurrent contexts. Lexicographers, if they know their job, not only provide definitions; they also provide instructions for contextual disambiguation, and this helps a lot in choosing the most adequate term in another language.
According to Peirce, every interpretation teaches us something more about the content of the interpreted expression. ‘Feline mammal’, ‘Felis catus’ and ‘domestic animal which miaows’ are certainly three different interpretations of the expression cat, but the first suggests a property (to be viviparous) that the second does not, and the third tells us something about the way to recognise a cat that the first did not provide. At the same time every interpretation focuses on the interpreted content from a different point of view. Thus all the interpretations of the same expression cannot be mutually synonymous, and every expression resembles a homonymous term conveying a different interpretation.
Moreover, in certain cases, we are facing examples of real homonymy, as happens with the very famous example of bachelor. This term can be translated as soltero, scapolo, célibataire only within a human context, possibly concerning questions of marriage. Within a university context a bachelor is a person who has received a bachelor’s degree (therefore it becomes a diplomato or improperly a laureato in Italian, or a licencié in French), and in a medieval context a bachelor is ‘a young knight who follows the banner of another’ – that is, in Italian, a baccelliere. Within a zoological context, a bachelor is ‘a male animal, like a seal, without a mate during breeding time’. It is because of these contextual selections that, if I am given the English text John, a bachelor, who studied at Oxford, is now writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the North Pole bachelors, I should not translate it into French as Jean, une foque sans copine qui s’est licenciée à Oxford, est en train d’écrire une thèse de doctorat sur les célibataires du Pole Nord . . .3
At this point we can understand why AltaVista’s Babelfish is doomed to be wrong. It is not endowed with a vocabulary that includes contextual selections (or that can interpret them with sufficient precision). Thus AltaVista was unable to realise that the word work has one sense in a literary context and another in an industrial one. Or maybe AltaVista was endowed with the necessary information that works in literature means a series of texts or books, but it did not receive any information that the phrase to be translated concerned literature. In order to realise it, AltaVista would have had to know that Shakespeare was a poet and a playwright and not an industrial tycoon. This is the kind of information that is not usually provided by dictionaries, but by encyclopaedias.
Is it conceivable that AltaVista was not provided with contextual information? Perhaps it simply needs a larger context, so that it can find therein useful information in order to disambiguate the most puzzling expressions. In order to test this theory I chose a more consistent and very well-known text:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light. And God saw the Light, that it was good: and God divided the Light from the darkness. And God called the Light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so.
I asked AltaVista to translate it into Spanish, and I got in return:
En el dios que comenzaba creó el cielo y la tierra y la tierra estaban sin forma, y vacío; y la oscuridad estaba sobre la cara del profundo. Y el alcohol del dios se movió sobre la cara de las aguas. Y el dios dijo, dejó allí ser luz: y había luz. Y el dios vio la luz, de que que era bueno: y el dios dividió la luz de la oscuridad. Y el dios llamó el día ligero, y la oscuridad que él llamó a Noche. Y la tarde y la mañana eran el primer día. Y el dios dijo, dejó allí ser un firmament en el medio de las aguas, y lo dejó dividir las aguas de las aguas. Y el dios hizo el firmament, y dividió las aguas que estaban bajo el firmament de las aguas que estaban sobre el firmament. Y estaba tan.
AltaVista cannot be blamed if it interpreted God called the Light Day as the story of a god who summoned a weightless day; likewise, the idea of interpreting void as a noun and not as an adjective can be considered a minor flaw. AltaVista had the right to interpret face as cara (in English it would be countenance) and not as surface: why should the abyss have a surface and not a countenance, like the Moon? At most AltaVista should have detected that that it cannot be translated as que que, but nobody is perfect.
Altavista read beginning not as a noun but as an adjective, but I had never supposed that it was endowed with the biblical and theological competence necessary to be able to distinguish between a god who is there at the beginning and a god who is on the verge of starting something. Besides, even from a theological and cosmological point of view, this Dios que comenzaba is moving and convincing. As far as we know, it really was the first time He was creating a world, and perhaps this explains many imperfections of our universe, including the difficulties of translation.
It seems that AltaVista is not endowed with information about contextual selections or rules of contextual disambiguation because it was unable to realise that spirit acquires a given meaning when uttered or written in a church and another one when uttered or written in a pub. Why did it not know this? The answer is easy: it did not realise that the name God implies spiritual
