The Literature Machine: An Exploratory Analysis of Human and Machine Literary Translations from Indian Languages

In an interview when Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist, essayist, and short story writer, was asked about the relationship between science and literature, quoting the French theorist Roland Barthes, he said, "For literature, language is never transparent, and is never merely an instrument to convey a 'meaning' or 'fact' or a 'thought' or a 'truth'; that is, it cannot mean anything but itself. Whereas, on the other hand, the idea of language given by science is that of a neutral utensil that is used to say something else, to mean something foreign to it. This different concept of language is what distinguishes science from literature." (Calvino, 1997) Is language unique to living beings? Could a machine replicate it? What differentiates the language of literature from everyday language? In this paper, we examine human and machine translations of literary texts from four Indian languages—Marathi, Tamil, Hindi and Gujarati—into English and explore characteristics, similarity and differences between the two in the hope of shedding light on the dynamics, criteria and predicaments involved in the translation process and their changing face in current times.