TRANSLATING FOR THE FRAUENKIRCHE DRESDEN

Abstract

Based on the rapid improvement of neural machine translation and with the large amounts of texts and their contexts from nearly all areas of life, I assumed that it would not be long before we also could use machine translation for texts like literature and poetry. An experience from 1972 when I stood in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche Dresden, Germany, and a translation task in 2007 from the Initiators of the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche for a global billboard campaign taught me that human translation is still necessary. There are still translations that require the whole person with her/his experiences and memories, regardless of how much time has passed.

Keywords: neural machine translation; human translation; ruins; memories; reconstruction.