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Transduction

transduction · translation · catalogued

A chain of successive translations through several languages and back, the drift being the point of the exercise.

Provenance

  • Source: Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981)
  • Attribution: reference — attested in a standard reference rather than traced to an origin
  • Checkability: none — no computable acceptance criterion exists
  • Attested: codified — formulated as a rule by a tradition rather than declared by an author

Details

  • Kind: both
  • Languages: en
  • Requires: tokens
  • Deterministic: no
  • In other languages: Transduction (fr)

Notes

No acceptance criterion exists. The intermediate texts are not present: given only a source and a result, nothing distinguishes a text that made the round trip through several languages from one that never left, since any difference is equally consistent with both. The drift the form is about has no metric either — measuring semantic distance would grade translation quality, a different question from whether the chain occurred.

Prompt hint

Translate through several languages in turn and return to the first.

Why this has no checker

This procedure has no computable acceptance criterion, so it will never be implemented. It is catalogued because the form belongs in an honest survey of the field, and denckring status counts it separately rather than reporting a gap that cannot close.