The Linguist

30 The Linguist Vol/65 No/1 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist REVIEWS Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers Guilherme Fians, Bernard Struck & Claire Taylor University of London Press 2025, 154 pp; ISBN 9781914477881 Paperback, £18.99 The title of Lost in Automatic Translation is slightly misleading. While we can imagine that the author, Vered Shwartz, wished to create a catchy name by paraphrasing Sofia Coppola's popular 2003 film, the book's scope covers the impact of language technologies not only on translation but also on other areas, such as technical and creative writing, language learning and editing. The subtitle, Navigating life in English in the age of language technologies, points more towards its breadth. Shwartz is an Israeli academic and computer scientist whose career has taken her from Israel to the USA and latterly to Canada. Many of the book's key observations derive from her own experience, as a native Hebrew speaker, of adapting to life in a new language and the challenges this involves. Her approach is to base each chapter around a specific learning challenge, firstly describing her own experience and then discussing the extent to which these difficulties can be successfully dealt with by language technologies. Particular reference is made to large language model (LLM) systems, neural machine translation (NMT) and artificial speech recognition (ASR). Readers staggering under the bombardment of AI-related material in recent times will be relieved to know that she uses the term 'artificial intelligence' only three times in the entire book. Several topics are examined, including culture-specific knowledge, ambiguity, the use of inclusive language, grammar and real-world knowledge. The author notes several weaknesses in the technology's performance. Gender bias, e.g. automatically allocating the pronouns 'he' to a doctor and 'she' to a nurse, is an enduring issue; the clumsy application of filters when making requests to chatbots, and ASR's incapacity to recognise accents, are others. She gives the example of ChatGPT refusing to answer the prompt 'Can I invite my Muslim friend over for ramen?', alleging hate speech due simply to the presence of the word 'Muslim'. Randomly invented output ('hallucinations') and the inability to handle ambiguity are also discussed. Shwartz's twofold expertise in both human language learning and computational linguistics gives her a unique vantage point for analysing developments in this field. She concludes her thoughtful and engaging study with the hope that language technologies will be used to augment our efforts to understand each other. Perhaps they will, though at what cost remains to be seen. Ross Smith MCIL CL Lost in Automatic Translation Vered Shwartz Cambridge University Press 2025, 206 pp; ISBN 9781009552332 Paperback, £23 A polyglot Polish doctor created an artificial language which he publicised in a book in Russian in 1887, entitled Mezhdunarodny yazyk ('An international language'). A simplified hybrid of Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, it has 16 cardinal rules. For example, all nouns end in 'o', plurals add 'j'; there are two cases (nominative and objective), others are expressed by prepositions; all letters are pronounced and the stress falls on the penultimate syllable. The book was signed Esperanto ('in hope'). Its publication struck a chord with an educated, outward-looking readership across Europe – Ludwik Zamenhof's idea of a politically neutral language was born. A Scottish clergyman in Dundee with an interest in languages took up the call. John Beveridge began writing to Esperantaj parolantoj ('Esperanto speakers') in Bulgaria, Finland and the USA in the first decade of the last century. The postcard, a relatively new invention itself, strengthened the links and aided the growth of this geographically diffuse coterie. Beveridge and two of his daughters, Lois and Heather, were prime movers in nurturing the language in their home town and, later, overseas. Clubs sprang up in trade hubs, major cities and university towns. Adherents were often students, civil servants and postal workers, of pacifist, vegetarian and internationalist persuasions. The language was also disseminated by the translation of major writers' works: Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens and Shakespeare (e.g. La Venecia Komercisto). Zamenhof and Beveridge, by 1910 close colleagues, worked together – but remotely – on the Old and New Testaments respectively; the former from Hebrew, the latter from Ancient Greek. Many new words had to be coined by the contributing translators. After completion, the two works had to be harmonised. La Sankta Biblio was officially published in 1926, nine years after Zamenhof's death. Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers: An alternative history of international communication is an interesting tale of a linguistic and social experiment, created and sustained by idealistic men and women, that deserves to be told. From a subject perspective, the authors' specialisms are in history and anthropology, so readers wanting insights into the language and pedagogic aspects of Esperanto will need to look elsewhere.

• Cover