VSI Episode 1 (in Arabic!)

I put the phrase “variation selection inheritance” into Google Translate, selected Arabic and output the resulting script as an image file. It looks really cool, like a tattoo or something, but I have literally no idea what it would mean in context.

This was one of the strangest educational experiments I’ve ever done.

Saudi Arabia sends its teachers abroad for education. This includes both college professors, which seems more or less normal to us, and high school teachers like my one-time student Sondous Khan.

I’m sorry to say that at the time, her English was not really good enough to do college-level work in the US. She came to me more or less in desperation, looking for a research experience. I decided to flip the script and see if I could make her Arabic proficiency a strength rather than a weakness. I hoped maybe we’d translate the whole series or something.

Translation turns out to be really hard when neither person knows the other’s language. Google Translate existed at that time, but literal word-for-word transliteration is not the same thing as a conceptual translation, as so brilliantly demonstrated by “Numerous Statements of My Mobile Number,” which is Google Translate’s cover of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

It’s hard to appropriate

With relevant national laws

Numerous statements

Of my mobile number

We had many stilted, confusing discussions about trying to translate things like comic book fandom. This was probably 2013. Saudi Arabia’s very first ComiCon didn’t happen until 2017. Wikipedia describes it as a highly unusual event because both men and women were allowed to attend at the same time.

Wikipedia

I have no idea whether Ms. Khan found this situation as humorous as I did. In fact, to this day, I have no idea what she actually said in this piece of audio. She could have been calling me an idiot infidel the entire time. (She would not have been the first of my students to do so.)

At one point I did have download statistics from the Podbean website, naming and mapping the 40+ countries where I had listeners, which Ms. Khan used in her posters and presentations, but none of that material was archived with the site itself when the funding ran out. So I don’t know how many people in Saudi Arabia or other Arabic speaking countries ever listened to it.

I didn’t say it was my best experiment — just one of the strangest.