Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  We’re going international with ebooks and written content in the same word-for-word way that print books once did.

  Printing the Bible bankrupted Gutenberg. His financiers repossessed the equipment, and with the collapse of his workshop and his numerous lawsuits and losses, his workers had no place to go but elsewhere in Europe. Within fifty years of the first printed book, there were printing presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, France, and England. There were printers flourishing in hundreds of different towns.

  As the printers spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, they cross-pollinated and learned from one another, much like tech workers in Silicon Valley today. It’s not just the ambience of Silicon Valley—with its sunny climate and wineries and badminton courts—that makes it so successful. No, the tech workers go from one company to the other, like bees from one flower to another, rapidly cross-pollinating all of Silicon Valley with everyone’s ideas.

  I see the same cross-pollination already happening with ebooks. I see the flux of executives from New York’s book-publishing world coming to Seattle and Silicon Valley. I see Apple people coming to Kindle, Kindle people coming to Sony, and Sony people spreading the idea-pollen further afield. It’s all incestuous and cross-fertilized, and now that ebooks have been launched, there are no more secrets. You’ll be seeing better and better products, and maybe they’ll be more humanistic too.

  Wealthy readers in the sixteenth century refused on principle to read printed books. They scorned these books because they seemed to lack the humanistic touch of an actual scribe’s hand and thought that the printing was too mechanical compared to the natural way a scribe’s hand would vary as he wrote out every word. They didn’t like the regularity or precision of the printed book and found it less authentic. Though it was cheaper than a handwritten book, the printed book was scorned so much that printers deliberately introduced defects in the fonts and varied them to make the book seem more irregular and less perfectly typeset.

  It was a smart innovation, and if a sixteenth-century MRI machine had existed, it would have shown them what we have now learned: that the subtle differences in script and style in a handwritten book are actually better for reading retention. That’s because the brain pauses more and the eyes dart around more frequently to disambiguate words, giving the brain more time as it labors over every word to retain its meaning.

  And yet, as we know, hand-printed books didn’t last long. How many handwritten books do you have in your own library? None? I thought so. And how many traditional print books do you expect to see in the average household a generation from now? None? Exactly.

  The shift in taste away from print to digital will mirror the shift from handwritten to print.

  The ebook is the second wave in the original print revolution. And this second wave is larger than the original wave that Gutenberg ushered in. It’s a wave that has the ability to bring everything together, if it’s done well. As experiential products, ebooks are able to contain images and video and audio and games and social network conversations—something that print books can’t hope to accomplish.

  Not only that, but this second wave in reading can also bring down cultural barriers, like language itself. In the ultimate imagining of ebooks, it will be possible for one book to be rendered into many languages automatically. Likewise, all the comments will be automatically translated into the same language, allowing you and someone in Egypt or Spain to converse as book lovers while reading the same book, without worrying about language barriers.

  But we need good language-translation services first.

  Globally, there are about 6,900 living languages and at least that many unique ways of seeing the world.

  Languages are puzzle boxes. What we do when we speak expresses only a hundredth of what we actually think. We leap from idea to idea with barely a thought, but we only express one idea of the many we conceive. That’s what makes conversations so much fun, and books too. They are all about translating, interpreting, discovering, and creating meanings from these puzzle boxes.

  The difference is that languages aren’t antiques, like dusty, inlaid Chinese boxes with sliding panels. They’re made fresh every minute with every new utterance and usage, and they have to be deciphered anew at every sentence. So much is unsaid in a sentence that it has to be puzzled out and reconstructed. The process can often go awry, maybe because the speaker was joking, or using puns or double entendres, or perhaps because the listener misinterpreted what he or she read or heard.

  Given all that can go wrong in communicating a sentence, let alone an entire book, it’s a wonder that books are translated at all.

  And in fact, no translation is perfect. Any skilled translator will perform a deep reading of the book and try to interpret it before rewriting it anew. Inevitably, though—and this is part of the charm of translations—different nuances are brought to bear on the final translation because each translator interprets the book differently. Each translator implicitly refracts the book’s meaning through the crystal of his or her own life.

  Some translations are more widely read than the originals and have a greater cultural impact. For example, between 1604 and 1611, the original Bible was translated into the English common at the time of Shakespeare. Named the King James Bible, after the then-current king of England, it abounds with terms we still use—turns of phrase such as “a broken heart” or “a drop in the bucket” or even “bite the dust” —but these, of course, never appeared as such in the original Greek and Latin.

  This version of the Bible influenced writers from John Milton to William Faulkner. The text of the King James Bible was carefully crafted word by word by a committee of unpaid but highly devoted scholars who worked on this as a “labor of love.” They were men who perhaps never “saw eye to eye” but who “went the extra mile” to phrase the Bible in simple, easygoing speech.

  But we’re in a digital world now. Since 2009, more books have been self-published every year than published by traditional publishers. In 2011 alone, almost 150,000 new self-published books glutted the marketplace, according to Bowker, a U.S. book trade organization. This is far more books than can conceivably be translated by humans. We shouldn’t have to rely on translators, right? Perhaps we’re sophisticated enough now that this can be automated and done digitally.

  Google, for example, already offers a way to translate a given ebook into the language of your choice. I wanted to see how accurate automatic book-translation could be, so as an experiment, I took a paragraph from this chapter and used Google’s translator service to render it into another language (say, Chinese) and then re-translate it back into English. For example, when I translated “Languages are puzzle boxes” into Chinese and back to English, I got “Languages are mystery boxes, old conundrum boxes.” To determine the success rate, I took the number of correct words and subtracted it from the total number of words, and then divided by two, since we’re translating twice.

  I tested a few different languages this way. Scores ranged from 83 percent for German to 65 percent for Japanese and averaged around 75 percent fidelity to the original text. A cynic would argue that this only proves my writing is more German than Japanese. But I would interpret this to mean that, on average, three-quarters of a given book of similar complexity to my own could be translated reasonably well into any language.

  What’s the threshold for automatic translation? Apple’s virtual assistant Siri seems to have a success rate of 86 percent, and people are still complaining, so clearly, we have a few more years to wait before automated ebook translation happens and we’re able to achieve the global vision of reading that I described above. Even though they’re offered as part of Google’s ebook reading experience, automatic translations just aren’t good enough yet. But soon, perhaps in the “twinkling of an eye,” automatic translations will be good enough to read—but never as good, I think, as those from a skilled human translator.

  Of course, the great thi
ng about the future is that we can’t predict it. Perhaps an ebook innovator like Google will build a new Tower of Babel, but in reverse, reconstructing it from its rubble across all cultures. It’s ironic that the new Tower of Babel might be raised from the squat, windowless concrete building that holds Google’s cloud. Google is well poised to do this with its translation software and expertise.

  Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that Google can rebuild the Tower of Babel from rubble, one captcha at a time? (Captchas are those forms you fill out on websites when you have to verify your identity. They usually have a smudged word or two for you to type in.) Most of the captchas you see on the internet are from Google. They’re how Google fixes conversion errors in their ebook content. Every time you verify yourself on a website, you’re helping Google to decipher one or two words in one of millions of their books.

  As a technologist, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to automatically decipher any book fairly well. I think that is stunning, because it opens up a whole new set of authors for me to read! These are authors who aren’t commercially important enough for publishers to translate themselves but authors that I would like to read, nonetheless.

  Bookmark: Dictionaries

  Dictionaries, as we know them, are static snapshots of a culture at an instant in time, defined by a bunch of old men in an ivory tower in Oxfordshire, England. This ivory tower is crumbling, though, and is being replaced by sites like Wordnik and UrbanDictionary.

  In my experience, CEOs of companies are often spreadsheet-blooded, boorish, bottom-line businessmen. But company founders are often warm and soulful. They’re people like Erin, the founder of Wordnik. She’s so sweet that I wonder if she’s ever had a negative thought in her life. There’s a little red heart on her business card, for heaven’s sake.

  The former editor of Oxford’s dictionaries, Erin started her company to create contextual dictionaries, to scour the web and books and magazines for words and assemble what those words really mean in context, using clues from the content.

  Current e-readers—and some enhanced ebooks—often include a dictionary to help you look up words, which is awesome. It’s a feature I miss when I’m reading printed books. These days, I often find myself wanting to tap the physical page to select a word and see its meaning.

  Having a dictionary built into my e-reader is great, and dictionaries will only get more exciting over time. That’s right. You heard me: dictionaries will become downright exciting! You’ll be able to bring out the culture’s intent as you read with these new internet-enabled dictionaries and encyclopedias, ones that are germane to the book you’re reading.

  Imagine, for example, that you’re reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery from the 1890s. How nice it would be to have a culturally appropriate dictionary to use while you read, a Victorian one that recognizes 1890s slang and brand names. It would help you get more out of the book as you read it and uncover hidden dimensions.

  Certain publishers are starting to do this by building limited glossaries into certain enhanced ebooks. These interactive glossaries are seamlessly integrated into the text and pop up with definitions to unfamiliar words or phrases at the tap of a finger. As more and more books get digitized, algorithms will start to mine texts for bits of slang and brand names and other culturally relevant references and automatically assemble them into minimally invasive, dictionary-like resources you can use while you read.

  It’s a neat reimagining, in which dictionaries are no longer curated by old men in beards like Daniel Webster himself, arranging index cards for decades into one man’s vision of what a dictionary should be. Instead, the culture creates its own dictionary. And the more content that’s used, the better the dictionary becomes and the more expansive it is.

  I can see what people like Erin are doing, and I look ahead a few years to a time when these live online dictionaries replace those embedded in e-readers. I also look forward to a time when such dictionaries perhaps let you see the author’s intent as you read, wavering into and out of focus below the iPad’s shimmery screen.

  But would you even use such dictionaries? Perhaps you think dictionaries already get in the way of your reading experience and you’d rather enjoy the flow of the author’s words without interrupting it. Or perhaps you think dictionaries are overkill and we already have enough basic words in our language to use to clearly express ourselves.

  A post on xkcd.com presented a plan for the Saturn V rocket but described its components using only the thousand most frequently used words in English. Surprisingly, the description was very readable. There’s no word for rocket, so the caption says, “Fire comes out here,” and likewise the crew capsule is a “people box.” It’s sheer brilliance. Just search online for “Saturn 5 top 1000” to see the full plan in all its glory. And while you’re at it, let me know what you think about the future of dictionaries and words!

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/15.html

  Language Change: “Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote…”

  Lingo S changiN fst 2day. tnk u cn kip ^ W it? gr8. NP.

  f nt, ur n 4 a vvv hrd time :(

  Our language is changing, and lexicographers are jumping out of their ivory-tower windows.

  The English language is no longer managed by an editorial team in the austere offices of Merriam-Webster, Inc., or the Oxford English Dictionary. Believe me, I know. I’ve met with their editors at their offices, and the spirit of the English language had fled. The English language is afoot in the world, and she’s not going to be penned up again.

  New words sometimes used to take decades to trickle into the vocabulary, but now that happens faster than a speeding SMS message. We even have words that aren’t, strictly speaking, words. Both n00b and w00t are examples of leetspeak, internet slang that has gone mainstream. One 2012 estimate suggested that 8,500 new words enter the English language every year. Most of these are product names, such as Twitter or iPad.

  What will language be like in the future? Will it be some strange hybrid of letters and numbers? Will new words be graced with arpeggios from the extended ASCII character set? Will we find serious works of fiction studded with smiley emoticons? Will the great American novel be written on a teen’s smartphone, one text message at a time, and broadcast live on the internet for everyone to read?

  Language change is fundamental and unavoidable. That said, ebooks are accelerating this change. Ebook self-publishing, for example, encourages new words to enter the lexicon faster than ever before. This is because self-published ebooks are usually edited only by the authors and not by traditional editors, a shift in the process that is used at major publishing houses. Unpoliced by vigilant editors, new words from street culture or internet subcultures sometimes slip into self-published ebooks, intrude into the language, and achieve mainstream status.

  And this is nothing to worry about.

  You see, ebooks will hasten the rapid change in language and aid in its transformation. But let me pause for a moment to explain language change by way of an example.

  I was in the hospital recently, visiting a friend recovering from surgery. She was coming out of anesthesia, and I was a little worried. There’s always a rare chance with anesthesia that a patient will die in her sleep. My friend had been out for a long time after the procedure and was finally coming round. As she grogged awake, I asked her if she was okay, and what she said sounded like, well, pure gibberish.

  I was concerned, thinking she was speaking in tongues or had some brain damage. So I asked her to repeat it, and she did, slower this time. Still gibberish. I was about to fetch one of the nurses, when my friend finally explained that it was the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and repeated it slowly:

  Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

  She had memorized the passage as a kid and had recited it to prove to herself that her memory was still intact after anesthesia.

/>   I didn’t recognize that this was Middle English. That surprised me, because I know modern English, and I’ve even studied Anglo-Saxon English. But I simply couldn’t understand what she said. There’s a gulf of centuries between Chaucer and us, and to a non-expert speaking one dialect, the other is unintelligible. I very much doubt that Chaucer would be able to understand our use of English, either, although he’d surely be fascinated.

  Chaucer was a contemporary of Gutenberg, and since his time, English has been radically altered and vastly expanded. The Renaissance brought an explosion of Greco-Latinate words into our vocabulary. We can choose whether we want to sound pretentious or smart. We can obfuscate or hide. We can cogitate or think. The older German-tinted English words like “hide” and “think” are still here, but we can use grandiloquent ones too—like the word “grandiloquent” itself. Not only that, but there also has been an explosion of brand-name words, starting in the 1950s. Chaucer would have no idea how to xerox a PowerPoint—he would accuse you of speaking in tongues. Or “spekinde tungen.”

  And it’s not just words that have changed. It’s style too.

  English has a lilty, singsong quality when spoken. The words go up and down, like a buoy on the waves. You see this in stylized English writing too. But you don’t see it in text messages. And you don’t see it in business-speak.

  I’ve suffered through countless Amazon deep dives and read reams of business requirement documents that, if stacked sky high, could be a splinter in God’s eye. These documents are logically organized, efficient, and detailed and yet devoid of the soul and sparkle of the English language herself. That’s ironic, because all of these documents were geared toward the Kindle, toward reinventing reading.