Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (88 page)

And so when we hear little Ellie voice pity for the daddy bongo, we anticipate how she’ll reply when her father asks what’s keeping him from drinking. Of course she’ll say that it’s because the pond isn’t made of water — it’s a
fake
pond, a plastic non-pond. The poor daddy bongo! We can see it coming a mile away — Ellie will let the museum-display side of the analogy contaminate the African-savanna side.

And indeed she does, but in a way that catches us off guard, saying, “He can’t drink because he’s
dead
!” Now where did
that
idea come from? Only a moment ago she said that the daddy bongo was longing to drink. But how can he long to drink — how can he have any feelings at all — if he’s dead? If the daddy bongo is indeed dead, then Ellie
shouldn’t be feeling sorry for him at all, because the whole scene is lifeless, desireless. In short, Ellie is having her cake and eating it too — for her, the daddy bongo is both alive (full of longing, and part of the African-savanna side of the analogy) and dead (insentient, and part of the museum-display side of the analogy) at the same time.

This is reminiscent of the dizzy Copycat answer
xyz ⇒ dyz
, where a keen insight is instantly followed by a thought so shallow that it feels like we’ve just suffered a whiplash. Such modes of thought exude such dizziness that they often will provoke laughter, and when this anecdote is told, it unfailingly does so.

Perhaps this strange, confused-seeming blending of ideas should not surprise us all that much, since children are constantly playing with all sorts of objects, pretending that they are something very different, yet knowing full well that they are not
really
that thing. Children live in this kind of superposition of spaces much more than adults do, and so they are used to the constant back-and-forth between two levels of interpretation of what is in front of their eyes. For a child at play, a wooden block can easily be a knight riding a horse and a wastepaper basket can easily be a castle that the knight is charging. Of course the child knows that they are
really
a wooden block and a wastepaper basket, and can shift into that mental space on a dime (for instance, if the wastepaper basket tips over and a few papers fall out of it and have to be put back in), but while in the pretend-and-play mode, the child has no trouble keeping that knowledge somehow compartmentalized.

But Ellie’s remark goes way beyond the usual shifting-on-a-dime that children standardly do; somehow it violates all expectations. It is as if the child playing with the wooden block and wastepaper basket were to say, “The knight is sad, because he wants to jump up on top of the castle, but he can’t!” If we were to ask the child why not, we would expect an explanation of this sort: “He can’t jump up there because he knows the castle has no roof and he’ll fall inside it and be trapped forever in it!” That reply would gracefully blend the wastepaper basket’s actual shape and intended function with the play world, where it is a castle. But the child throws us by saying, “He’s sad because his horse can’t jump at all — it’s just a stupid piece of
wood
, and anyway, it’s only the size of my
hand
! It could never jump to the roof of a castle!”

In this book, aside from the examples given above in the Copycat microworld, we have discussed many everyday analogies that, if one goes back and examines them, are easily seen to be frame blends. For example, recall the story in which a person pointed to the seat across the aisle in a train and remarked, “The chatterbox on the trip down was sitting right
there!”
Two frames were being conflated and blended, thanks to an analogy between two trains traveling on different days. More precisely, the directly visible seat in the current train was being mentally inserted into a different train that had been traveling in the opposite direction on a different day. In the interest of efficient communication, truth was being efficiently conveyed through a strategy mixing falsity, analogy, and blending.

Another frame blend occurred in
Chapter 4
, where we compared an eclipse of the moon, which involves sun, earth, and moon, to an analogous situation with a flashlight, an orange, and a ping-pong ball. What made this a frame blend was when we added the idea of ants on the orange watching the whole event in the “sky”. It became even more of a blend when we suggested blowing the scene up by a factor of a hundred million. The resulting image of a gigantic flashlight in outer space, which is pointing at a colossal orange (the earth’s size) floating in the void, on whose rind are standing stupendously large ants (a hundred times taller than Everest) staring out into space and watching with awe a huge, darkened ping-pong ball, is a quintessential frame blend.

Another frame blend we discussed was how one decides whether one wants to take a job that has been offered, by mapping oneself onto a friend who has a similar job or who works in a similar place. In the analogy one makes, one inevitably blends some aspects of oneself into one’s model of the friend, or some aspects of the friend into one’s model of oneself, thus producing a hybrid imaginary individual, neither fish nor fowl.

As we pointed out earlier, frame-blending is not by any means always a “contaminated” or “defective” way of thinking. Hypothetical individuals — mental blends between real people — are in fact common in everyday analogies. For example, we described Mark, who was reading a newspaper article about the swimming competitions at the Beijing Olympics, comparing himself to Michael Phelps, and wondering what he would have done in Phelps’s shoes (or lack thereof) — mixing
himself
into
the 2008 Olympic games, feeling the water of the pool and the excitement of the competition, adjusting his age and athletic abilities in order to make the imaginary insertion work. In coming up with this analogy, Mark thus created an intricate mental blend of himself and Phelps.

For a more complex example of an analogy that blends frames, consider the case of a woman who, flaring up at her husband for an insensitive remark, picks up a plate, then puts it down, and says, “If I’d been my mother, I
would
have thrown it at you!” The implicit analogy links the current fight to numerous fights that the wife witnessed, as a child, between her parents. She is envisioning her mother in this room (but much younger than she actually is), married to this man (or to a blend of him and her father) and who actually throws the plate. On the other hand, all the pent-up fury stemmed from the fight that just took place, so the hypothetical plate-thrower is as much the woman herself as it is her mother. The natural and inviting analogy between the two marriages, including their contrasts, is being exploited by the wife in order to shed new light on their current fight. By momentarily blending herself with her mother and envisioning this version of herself
actually
throwing the plate, and then by telling her husband about this scenario, the wife has at least managed to let off a bit of steam.

The act of carrying a book from the culture in which it was conceived to another culture cannot help but involve a large number of frame blends. Suppose one is translating a novel written in America into Chinese. Not only will all the people in it
wind up fluently speaking a language that they don’t know, but all the concepts denoted by the words in the story have grown in different “gardens” in the minds of Chinese readers. We need only to think of what happens to such concepts as
city, bicycle, house, store, rice, river, mountain, poem, writing, word, eyes, hair
, and so forth, when they are transported (through literal translation) from the American culture to the Chinese culture. The central members of each of these categories, making up its “old town”, are clearly very different in China and in America. The upshot is that Chinese readers of the novel will automatically and unconsciously bring in certain Chinese preconceptions when they read the novel in Chinese. The places and the events they imagine will subtly blend America (where the events take place) and China (where the concepts grew). And the same thing happens, of course, in any act of translation between any two languages, because some parts of the original work remain constant while other parts are necessarily subject to distortion.

Despite the complexity that we’ve just described, translation seems like a relatively mechanical activity to some people. And indeed, the idea of mechanical translation was first proposed three score and several years ago, at which time it seemed reasonable and relatively straightforward. For example, one of the founders of the field, the noted mathematician Warren Weaver, wrote the following: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say, ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’ ” Weaver’s humorous statement expresses the credo underlying machine translation, which is that translation is an act of “decoding” essentially analogous to using a substitution cipher, in which, in order to encode or decode a message, all one needs to do is to replace the message’s symbols, one by one, by other symbols, according to a fixed table of correspondences. To be concrete, one might encode a message by replacing every letter in it by its alphabetic successor, which will in general yield an illegible piece of text, such as “Gpvs tdpsf boe tfwfo zfbst bhp”; then, in order to decode such an encrypted message, one would do the reverse transformation, replacing every letter by its alphabetic predecessor, in this case yielding Abraham Lincoln’s famous opening gambit, “Four score and seven years ago”.

In the early days of machine translation, translation between languages was seen as this same process but just on a larger scale, in the sense that it operated not on letters but on words, and the correspondence table wasn’t just 26 items long but was a huge bilingual dictionary, giving, for each word,
the
matching word in the other language. And lastly, it was presumed that, in order to fix up awkwardnesses due to discrepancies between the grammars of the two languages involved, the scrambled word order that would almost surely result could be cleaned up by a complex but straightforward mechanical rearrangement process that took both grammars into account.

This substitution-and-rearrangement process remains the most common philosophy underpinning mechanical-translation efforts even today, except that the units in the semantic correspondence table are often taken at a somewhat higher level than that of individual words — they can include idiomatic phrases and other large chunks (for example, “to be under the weather” might be rendered in French, as an indivisible chunk, by “ne pas être dans son assiette”, literally meaning “not to be in
one’s dish”). Indeed, bilingual data bases containing many millions of corresponding phrases are thoroughly scoured in ultra-rapid fashion in order to allow the computer to find “the best” (in some sense) alignments that will yield the “decoding” into Language B of a phrase, sentence, or any passage originally written in Language A.

We might test the efficacy of this strategy by seeing how the world’s most readily available (and perhaps also its most sophisticated) machine-translation “engine” performs on our little Lincolnian phrase “Four score and seven years ago”. (The term “engine” is a friendly tip of the hat to Charles Babbage, the great nineteenth-century British computing pioneer, who invented an important predecessor of today’s computers, which he called the “Analytical Engine”.) We asked Google’s engine to translate this phrase into French, and in but milliseconds it shot back at us the words “Quatre points et il ya sept ans”. (Strangely enough, “ya” is not a French word, but that’s nonetheless what the engine came up with.) To test the program’s understanding of its own output, we fed this phrase (with “ya” unchanged) into the engine and threw it into reverse gear; instantly, out popped “Four points and seven years ago” (the clever engine didn’t stumble in the least over the non-word “ya”). Anyone can imagine how the translation engine might have gotten “four points” out of the words “four score”, but, despite the plausibility of that guess, the engine’s output, whether in French or in English, doesn’t make any sense.

We carried this experiment out not just once but many times, and discovered that the French output was not stable at all. Sometimes it was better, sometimes not; in any case, the first output we quoted reappeared on more than one occasion. When we asked the same translation engine to render Lincoln’s phrase in German, it returned to us “Vier der Gäste und vor sieben Jahren” — “Four of the guests and seven years ago”. We have no clue as to how, beginning with “score”, it came up with “guests”. In Spanish, it gave us “La puntuación de cuatro y siete años atrás” — “The grade of four and seven years back” (“grade” meaning “school grade”).

The translation engine has no notion of meaning. It is not trying to
understand
its input, but simply to operate on the marks making it up. In that regard, the operations carried out by the Google translation engine are, indeed, much like the operations of encoding or decoding using a substitution cipher, which don’t involve meaning in any way at all. This is exactly the view that Warren Weaver proposed sixty years earlier, his vision having been of an unthinking, meaning-ignoring, mechanical substitution process that would allow one to toggle back and forth between any two languages.

It is difficult to fathom how such a simplistic view of translation could possibly have been put forth by the same person who wrote
Alice in Many Tongues
, a delightful short study devoted, with clear love, to a discussion of how some of the trickier passages in Lewis Carroll’s wordplay-filled
Alice in Wonderland
had been rendered by highly creative translators into French, Italian, German, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Swahili, Pidgin English, Japanese, and Chinese. In this book, Warren Weaver pays careful attention to how superb translators handled such complex challenges as parodied verse, wordplay, nonsense passages, and other ways in which form and content are deeply entangled with each other, and with reverence he
describes the artistry with which some of the translators found brilliant solutions to these challenges. Over and over again he points out that high-quality translation is anything but mechanical, and in so doing, he implicitly demonstrates as many times that translation in no way resembles a “mechanical decoding” process, but that it requires continual discovery of ingenious new analogies. Indeed, his book’s message is that translation depends crucially on drawing deeply from the well of one’s life experiences and mental resources in order to come up with appropriate analogues in Language B for strings of characters written in Language A.