Book review: Babel

What if languages have magical power that drives the world?

Spoiler alert.

The details come from my memory. These may be inaccurate.

There is a peculiar setting in Babel: when a word is translated from a language to the other, some subtle parts of the meaning can’t be completely carried over. An example is translating“MingBai“(明白) from Chinese into English. If we translate it into “understand”, we lose a taste of illumination. If we take the metaphorical transfer “illuminate“, then, we lose the feeling of a sudden change-of-state from unknown into known. The meaning lost / gained during translation carries magical power, and the translators are able to attach the power onto silver bars. The bars are then sold around the world, and drive the infrastructures going. Babel, according to the book, is the Royal Translation Institute at the Oxford University.

The protagonist, Robin, wrote the “明白 — understand“ match pair during the exam, and let a silver bar light up the exam hall. His trajectory of growth throughout this book is a process of “understanding”. He is originally a student at the Babel institute. During the study, he learned about the atrocity of the British colonizers — in the 19th century, the colonizers did not consider those non-white nations equal species. Robin decided to team with a secret team in the Babel institute, to try to stop the wars, and further, to tell everyone that different nations should be equal.

A random note: In the era of AIs, isn’t the magic power of language also being delivered everywhere in the world?