A new approach to the mechanical syntactic analysis of Russian

From the moment that a writer conceives an idea which he desires to communicate to his fellow men, sizable stumbling blocks are strewn in the path of the future translator. For the ability to shape one’s thought clearly, or even completely, is not granted to many; rarer still is the gift of expressing the thought— precisely, concisely, unambiguously—in the form of words. There is no guarantee, therefore, that the author’s written text is a reliable image of his original idea. Furnished with this more or less distorted record, the translator is expected to perform a number of amazing feats. In the first place, he has to discern— often through the dim mist of the source language— the writer’s precise intention. This requires not only a perfect knowledge of both the source language and the subject matter treated in the text, but also the mental skills customarily exercised by the professional sleuth. In addition, these newly reconstructed ideas must be rendered into a target language which is so unequivocal and so faithful to the source—as to convey, to every reader of the translator’s product, the exact meaning of the original foreign text! Small wonder, then, that a fabulous achievement like Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat is regarded in the nature of a miracle. For the general case, it would seem that characterizing a sample of the translator’s art as a good translation is akin to characterizing a case of mayhem as a good crime: in both instances the adjective is incongruous. If, as a crowning handicap, we are asked to replace the vast capacity of the human brain by the paltry contents of an electronic contraption, the absurdity of