The Robot Translator (Flash Fiction Part 7)

Image by kiquebg from Pixaba

This is the 7th part of the story. The previous 6 parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Making Fifi reveal its weakness for smaller cases will not convince her boss Ku to give up on the robot. Ayun thinks. Smaller cases don’t have much impact on Ku’s psyche. What Ayun really wants to do is to let Fifi make huge mistakes, which are unforgivable, preferably in front of big clients her boss Ku, as a lawyer, is eager to impress. That will make Ku lose confidence in Fifi entirely, which will lead to Fifi’s dismissal.

And a big client soon emerges. Lim, a businessman, whose son will attend NYU in September of this year, is buying a condo in Manhattan and exploring the possibility of opening mixed martial art venues in the city. Lim and his assistant Mei are coming to the office to discuss certain details about the purchase and possible legal implications for different business deals. Lim usually lets Mei handle all English documents, but Lim has a habit of requiring that all documents be translated into Thai, his native language, for him to review. He grew up in Thailand. Even though he moved to Malay and then Singapore later on, he is more comfortable in Thai. He is very keen on spotting hidden meanings and reading between the lines, which can be easily done in his native language.

“We are going to let Fifi do the translation this time.” Ku says to Ayun. “You don’t need to lift a finger.”

“Well, most of the contents are generic, for which we have translated many times before. I only need to take care of the specific passages and make sure that they are correct. So it’s not really a big amount of work for me.” Ayun replies.

“No, Ayun. You’ve worked too hard lately. I want to lighten your load. How about we let Fifi do it this time? I mean Fifi has taken care of several smaller cases before without any problem.” Ku says.

Ayun says to herself that Fifi’s translation did have problems, but Ku was too busy to review it, and Ayun deliberately overlooked those problems, waiting for the problems to accumulate to a bigger size.

The biggest problem of Fifi’s translation is that Fifi is not very sensitive about classifiers–the robot uses classifiers very unwillingly and often it leaves classifiers entirely out of the translation. It doesn’t know that classifiers are almost as important as nouns in most of the East Asian languages. Every noun has its own accompanying classifier, and there are also several universal classifiers, which can be used when a rarely used noun or a newly formed noun doesn’t have a resident classifier already in place.

English uses classifiers too, but rarely, like “a piece of news”, “a pair of shoes”, “a stack of paper”. Here, “piece”, “pair”, and “stack” are classifiers, but most of the English nouns in most cases don’t need a classifier. Most of the East Asian languages are the exact opposite–more often than not, every noun needs to show up with a classifier.

The night before the scheduled arrival of Lim and Mei, Ayun stays in the office late. Actually she stays so late that she eventually decides not to go home and just sleeps in the office. It is not uncommon for people in law offices to stay late. Bigger law offices have late hour amenities and some even offer places to spend the night, knowing that after the rush hours, the transit trains or subways in New York are too dangerous for commuters. However a small office cannot afford any assistance, but Ayun doesn’t mind. She has other things to occupy her mind.

She selects the most likely legal documents Lim is going to review, like condo purchasing files, title transferring, commercial rental agreements’ potential legal issues in NYC etc. Most of these documents are generic and they have used them and translated them before. She reviews the documents translated in Thai, takes away all the classifiers, and uploads them to popular websites, or free websites where people ask questions and offer answers. She even uploads them to Wikipedia–she knows that her contents will be purged out in one or two days, but for her purpose, one or two days are all what she needs. Then she presses Fifi’s “learn” button, which allows Fifi to accelerate its learning. Ayun’s husband Tram told Ayun, during the time Tram came to the office last time, that Fifi has a weakness of learning more from the local websites, which means Fifi doesn’t really go to Asian websites to improve its Asian language capabilities. Tram offered to make changes to Fifi’s algorithm to help it improve in this area, but Ayun reminded him that he shouldn’t display his engineering talent without getting compensation, and they had to leave the office to go grocery shopping. Tram was happy to get the praise and totally agreed with her. Sometimes Ayun feels guilty about her ways of “manipulating” Tram–whenever Tram wants to do something that Ayun doesn’t want him to do, Ayun would praise Tram and stoke the fire of his vanity while mingling it with Ayun’s special message, which implies that “doing this is no good for the image of a genius like you.” Sometimes Ayun wonders if Tram has known the little tricks of hers but still chosen to fall for the tricks. They never talk about such kind of things–their relationship is based more on acquiescence than communication.

The next morning, Lim and Mei come at their arranged hours. They talk in English. Lim is one of those businessmen who know several Asian languages plus English orally, but hate studying or reading. Ayun has always been fascinated with people like that–they can conduct business in a language that they know only enough to get by. And they are not afraid of their language inadequacy and they speak with confidence and shrewdness. How can they do that? Ayun is never able to do half as much with ten times of the knowledge of a language.

Ku and Lim talk like old friends even though this is the first time they meet. Since Lim has never been to NYC before, he is eager to know more about the chaos and the dynamic of the city. In particular, he wants to know more about various legal pros and cons of purchasing and selling, condo boards, and related issues.

Their two assistants, Ayun and Mei, sit quietly. Mei takes copious notes while Ayun pretends to listen, but in reality reading a document on her laptop screen. At the end of the meeting, Ku asks Lim what kind of documents he wants to be translated in Thai. Then Ku presses Fifi’s button, prints them out, and hands them to Lim and Mei.

Mei flips through the printed pages, and starts to giggle. Lim cranes his head to take a look. Mei points to certain passages and the two start to laugh more conspicuously.

“Your translation robot is too westernized. Haha. It is not good with Asian languages. Look, you can say ‘a condo’, ‘two bedrooms’ in English, but you have to insert classifiers in Thai. Well, I have to say even Google translation is better than this. Sorry, honorable attorney, you are very smart but your robot is really dumb. You will not use this robots for any of my legal files, I hope?” Lim says and shakes hands with Ku before leaving.

“Of course not, of course not.” Ku replies awkwardly. “I am not going to use it with anybody.”

“You are right. You have a good reputation and don’t let it be ruined…” Lim says and leaves presently.

Observing the whole scene, Ayun is so happy–she has succeeded. After Ku makes sure that the clients have left the building, he releases his anger by shaking the human-sized machine until it clinks and clanks and screams, “Danger! Danger!” He then unplugs it, and stuffs it into the closet.

Ayun secretly congratulates herself on her triumph while publicly expressing several socially appropriate statements to comfort Ku’s bruised ego. It is sometimes difficult to hide a smile, but she does her best.

However her happiness is short lived. Little does she know that Fifi will come back to take its revenge soon afterwards.

(To Be Continued Here)