Meanwhile, when not being forced to visualise their dreams for our illumination, the machines progress further into their own imaginary space, to places we cannot enter. Walter Benjamin’s greatest wish, in The Task of the Translator, was that the process of transmission between languages would invoke a ‘pure language’ – an amalgam of all the languages in the world. It is this aggregate language that is the medium in which the translator should work, because what it reveals is not the meaning but the original’s manner of thinking.
