Douglas Hofstadter
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition
Indiana University, Bloomington
Using a short poem by Clement Marot, a French poet of the sixteenth century, I'll look at various manners of translating, including content-only, form-only, and content-plus-form in various mixtures, and compare the kinds of results that they yield. I'll also consider Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment in the context of translation.
Douglas Hofstadter is College Professor of computer science and cognitive science, director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, and adjunct professor of philosophy, psychology, comparative literature, and the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. His Pulitzer-prize-winning book "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (1979) has had considerable impact on people in many disciplines, ranging from philosophy to mathematics to artificial intelligence to music, and beyond. He has written four other books, including the recent "Le Ton Beau de Marot", as well as numerous articles, and for a number of years wrote a column for Scientific American. He is spending the current academic year at the Stanford Humanities Center.