More on instant translation

Wakanomori shared a PDF of this (probably paywalled) article from the Atlantic, "The Costs of Instant Translation," by Ross Benjamin. This guy expresses so eloquently a lot of what I was reaching for in this post.

(  extensive quotes  )

I'm not a literary translator, but I definitely am drawn by the cultural specificity of languages, the "shimmer of ambiguity," as Benjamin puts it. The creation, together, of meaning when the languages don't line up.

P.S. If the article is indeed paywalled and you'd l...