Douglas Robinson Cyborg Translation Originally published (in shorter form, without the science-fiction inserts) in Susan Petrilli, ed., La traduzione. Special issue of Athanor: Semiotica, Filosofia, Arte, Letteratura 10.2 (1999-2000): 219-33. Science-fiction writers have long been fascinated by machine translation. Science-fiction writers could not care less about machine translation. Both propositions, I would argue, are true: science-fiction writers have been writing about machine translators for decades now, but only, it seems to me, because they (at least those working in English) are not really interested in how languages work, how human translators develop translation skills, how a working machine translator might be developed. Science-fiction writers are interested in writing speculative adventure stories about other times and other places than our own. Those stories almost invariably bring characters like the writer — human English- speakers — into close cultural and linguistic contact with members of other species; but the writers don’t want to get bogged down dealing with the intricacies of interspecies/intercultural/interlinguistic communication (they want to get on with the story), so they invent a gizmo to handle all translation problems for them. Some sort of box that intrepid space explorers lug around with them. A hearing-aid-like thing that they put in their ears, which somehow magically makes it possible for them to understand everything the bug-eyed monsters say and to speak BEMese. Let’s look at some of the forms of MT as imagined by science fiction writers over the past few decades, relying on the thumbnail sketches compiled by Walter Meyers in Aliens and Linguists.  In James Tiptree, Jr.’s “I’ll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty” (1971), Meyer writes, “a character lands on a planet and sees a battle going on. ‘Without pausing to think, he switched on his Omniglot Mark Eight voder and shouted “Stop that!”’ (p. 46). And they do. ... Tiptree’s model has a switch marked ‘Semantic Digest’; when set to this position, the decoder will boil down the input speech and give you just a summary of what is being said, rather than a sentence-for-sentence translation, although it can do that too” (120).  In Horace Fyfe’s “Random” (1952) “the human explorers both gather and analyze data in a few hours; as they tell the master of the properly impressed slave who has reported their landing, ‘We analyzed the speech of your companion this morning. ... The machine translates as we speak into it’ (p. 211)” (120)  In Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) the hero Cugel is given a device by a magician: “In order to facilitate your speech, I endow you with this instrument which relates all possible vocables to every conceivable system of meaning.”  In Michael Moorcock’s novel An Alien Heat (1972) we find the following passage: “Greetings, people of this planet,” began Yusharisp. “I come from the civilization of Pweeli” — here the translator he was using screeched for a few seconds and Yusharisp had to cough to readjust it —” many galaxies distant ...” Again a pause and a cough while