my life as a fourth interpreter

8/12/2019 My Life as a Fourth Interpreter

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MyInterpreteranguagcs coniceasily to mc. Myfamily is fromI the very middle

g out to buy a loaf of bread canlinguistic frontier. At

r for some years (until an

scholar, mastered the classicalages and Russian before I left theIt was only natural, then, when I found

B y K .myself in a strange land and in need of alivelihood, that I turned to translation. Atfirst I worked for a New York bank, handling correspondence with the Frankfurtoffice. It was a dull job, and neither wellpaid nor well respected. (The boss wascontinually saying Bitte and Danke to mc,which I found insufferable; he knew notanother word of German.) What I reallywanted was to do simultaneous translation, as I had heard it done on lunchtimevisits to the United Nations.About a year ago the internationaldepartment of the bank was reorganized,and I was left without a job. I made inquiries at the U.N., but I lacked credentials.And so it happened, one spring day, that Ianswered the following newspaper ad:

INTERPRETERFast, experienced. High-techassignment. Enter the excitingworld of computers. 32K.

The woman at the employment agencygave my resume a cursory look and askeda few questions. Curiously, we talkedmainly about Polish and about somethingshe called Reverse Polish, which I gathered was a sort of backwards jargon, likepig Latin. I told her plainly that I couldspeak no Polish either backwards or forwards, but it made no difference; all ofCentral Europe was of a piece to her. Atthe end of our brief interview she said Icould have the job, and she scribbledthe address on a slip of paper. It was aremarkable address, being made up ofnothing but numerals. What the numbersmeant, I eventually decided, was 1100110th Street, 11101-1011.Tracking down my new employer tookme into an area of the city I had never visited before. The cab driver, a Ukrainianemigre, assured mc he could find theplace: it was out on the island, he said,beyond the airports, in one of the newindustrial "parks." And indeed as wedrove on through the twilight we enteredwhat looked to be a factory district. Theglass spires of Manhattan had been leftbehind; here the buildings were low, flat-

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roofed, windowless and uniformly rectilinear. Yet they were not entirely withoutornament. On the two long faces of eachbuilding was a colonnade made up of adozen or more pillars set close to the wall.In stilted English my driver told me thestory of his life. (I concealed my knowledge of Russian lest I hear it in evengreater detail.) At one point he interrupted himself to say, "It is old joke aboutAmerica: The streets are paved withgold." When I looked out the window, Isaw what he meant. We were on a parkway, which wound among the factorybuildings and occasionally even passedunder them. I counted 16 parallel lanes,separated from one another by narrowgrass median strips. And yes, the roadways did have a metallic gleam, althoughthe color was more coppery than golden.The building where the taxi left me wasone of the larger examples of the newindustrial architecture, with a 20-columncolonnade front and back. Inside itseemed bigger still. The entire space wasfilled with brightly painted machinery.One section had thousands of smallmachines, all alikethey looked likeparking meters or gumball dispensers-laid out in columns and rows as in a perfectly planted orchard. Elsewhere theapparatus was arranged in banks thatappeared to work in unison; I supposedthey must be stamping out multiple copiesof the same part. Near the middle of theplant I could see a control panel with hundreds of dials, levers, switches and colored lights. And toward the four wallswere a number of cleared areas thatlooked like helicopter landing pads; I tookthem to be loading docks.In truth the place was not unpleasant inthe ways I would have expected of a factory. There was no noise, no clangor ofmetal meeting metal, but only a continualwhoosh in the background, like the soundof a radio tuned between stations. Andthere was no soot or grime; on the contrary, the room was exceptionally cleanand brighteven cheering in a gaudy

way. But why had they sent for me? Whatneed could they have here for a translator?A guard examined the address writtenon my slip of paper and conducted me to aglass-walled office overlooking the factory floor. The legend in gold leaf on thedoor panel read "Operating SystemSupervisor." Inside, a woman in a tweedsuit gave me a brisk handshake. "You'rethe new interpreter?" she said. "I'm Ms.Dos. I wish we had time to get properlyacquainted, but I'm afraid we're going tohave to put you to work straightaway. He'swaiting."I followed her down an open stairwayonto a metal catwalk suspended 20 feetabove the factory floor. It was narrowenough that we had to go single file, andso she spoke to me by half turning aroundas she walked. "It's a good thing youshowed up when you did," she said. "Idon't know what I would have done. Wejust lost our last interpreter. Clobbered bya bug." She must have noticed a flicker ofalarm in my face. "I know it's unsettlingto be brought in under these circumstances. But, as you doubtless know betterthan I, it's an occupational hazard."We were beyond the gumball orchardand somewhere to the right of the controlpanel when Ms. Dos took a sudden turninto an unmarked byway and thendescended a ladder to the polished floorbelow. I followed, gingerly. "Here weare," she said, with a sweep of the arm."Now I realize you're fluent in severallanguages, but I don't think you've everworked with a threaded one before, haveyou?""Pardon me?""Never mind. I'll run through thewhole routine anyway, just to be on thesafe side. There's not much to it, really;you just have to keep track of a couple levels of indirection, and of course be sureyou don't forget anything. The OuterInterpreter, you know, is the heart of thisoperation. We're all depending on you."OK, so the tokens come down thischute here, one at a time. The moment atoken arrives, you take it, you read theword on it, and then you look up the wordin the dictionary. We keep the dictionariesover here." She riffled the pages of a greatfolio volume mounted on a lectern.

"Sometimes you may have to search morethan one dictionary, but I'll come back tothat."Anyway, let's assume you find theword. Now there's quite a lot of information in a typical dictionary entry, but mostof it need not concern you. And to makethe job more manageable we've color-coded the dictionary entries. It's red forconstants, yellow for variables and bluefor colon definitions. So you take one ofthese slips in the color that matches theentry, and you read down through thedefinition until you come to what we callthe PFA, the parameter-field address. Youwrite the PFA on the slip, then you comeover here and put it in a capsule of thesame color. Finally you drop the capsuleinto the tube that matches its color. Allyou have to do is keep your colorsstraight.""Where do the tubes go?""The red and the yellow ones go to thestack supervisor, who has his boys push avalue onto the stack. The blue one is adirect line to Mr. Next. He takes care ofeverything else. Any other questionsbefore we go on?""Surely," I said, "it's not necessary tolook up every word in the dictionary." Iwas miffed that she would take me for thatkind of translator."How else would you find the PFA?""Well, suppose I already know whatthe words mean."She looked at me in sudden confusion."What they mean? How could you possibly know that? /don't know what theymean. Even Mr. Next doesn't know. Noone knows what the words meanunless,I guess, He knows.""He?""Well I always think of Him as He,although it could just as well be She. Youknow. Up there. Beyond the glass."I nodded assent, the way one does withpeople who are obviously mad. Ms. Doshad evidently developed similar suspicions about me, and she continued herlecture in a tone appropriate to a child oran idiot. "Now there will be times whenyou don't find a word in the dictionary.

COMPUTERLANGUAGE APRL1986


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take the tokenirs to the numbers depart

it; the counting houseand this is veryt, if you should get a token that

"There's just one more thing you havechute, youcheck

completely. There's a bottom tray on it like thein the cash register, that you

The talk of bugs unnerved me. I have ah I know it's irrational, that makes

't run; she couldn't even scream.never learned exactly what. Whenever I

I could have walked out that first day. I

would be only for a day or two, is that Iwas intrigued. When I left home forAmerika (my other uncle, Franz, alwaysspelled it that way), I was told I would seewonders. I was told they had a machine inAmerika for everythingone to wash theclothes, another to beat an egg, a third tobrush your teeth. But no one at homecould have guessed that I would findmyself operating the machinery of a vastlanguage factory, where words and numbers tumbled down chutes, got suckedinto pneumatic tubes and were pushed intocoin slots. If this is how an interpreterworked in the New World, I thought I hadbetter find out about it.

Moreover, the job gave me a chance toadd another language to my repertory, andwhat an odd language it turned out to be. Icouldn't identify it, but I knew it was notPolish. Many of the "words" inscribed onthe tokens were not words at all but meremarks of punctuationa period, a colon,an exclamation point, and so on. The dictionary was equally strange. It was notorganized alphabetically. Instead, youlooked up a word by starting at the back ofthe book and checking the last entry; if itdidn't match the word you were lookingfor, it would tell you the page and linenumber of the next entry to be checked.You worked all the way through the dictionary by following this trail ofcross-references.The words themselves were baffling.At first I thought Ms. Dos must be right:they were completely senseless. One fragment I remember from those early dayssaid, FLUSH OVER OVER HERE When I

would see such demented ranting, I wouldget the giggles. Later, though, phrasesbegan to tantalize me with glimmers ofmeaning. A series of tokens would comedown the chute, saying, DUP = IF ROTELSE DROP THEN. This was a dark saying but not totally opaque. Apparentlysomeone was either going to rot or goingto dropbut who? A dupe?For some weeks my own tasks seemedas arbitrary and meaningless as the wordsI was looking up. The PFAs were merenumbers that had no obvious connectionwith the words they supposedly defined.My position near the stack and the dictionary, however, turned out to be a goodobservation post, and in time patternsbegan to emerge. I noticed that wheneverI sent a message through the red or theyellow tube, the stack handlers wouldcome and put an extra tray on the heap.Similarly, when I passed the PFA for DUPthrough the tube to the mysterious Mr.Next, the stack boys would make a copyof the top tray and add it to the stack.When I processed a DROP token, the toptray would be discarded.Other words had effects of more directconsequence to me. When I came upon acolon in the stream of tokens, a clerk fromthe next room would shortly appear andbegin adding definitions to the dictionary.The word FORGET brought the clerk backto rip out entire pages. (The first time thishappened I tried to stop himI was sureone of us would get in troublebut heassured me it was all part of the job.) Fol-

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lowing the word DEFINITIONS, a clerkwould set up another lectern for a newdictionary.It was not hard work. The tokensbright brass coins that not only lookedlike subway tokens but in fact worked perfectly well in the turnstilesarrived at asteady pace. I would go through my ritualof consulting the dictionary, shooting amessage off to Mr. Next or whoever andchecking the stack, and when I got backthe next token would just then be rattlingdown the chute. There was an clement oftedium to it all, particularly in the constant references to the dictionary, but itwas the kind of work one can do with halfa mind, while simultaneously planningdinner or composing a letter home.The one relief from the routine was thebug alarm. The first time I had to pull theswitch I was frightened, not least becauseI almost missed my cue. I had looked up aword and been unable to find it, whichhappened fairly often, and so I haddropped the token in the numbers slot.This time, however, I did not hear theusual clanks, clunks and ratcheting noisesas the token worked its way through themachinery; instead, it merely reappearedin the reject bin below the slot. I verynearly did what one always does when abalky vending machine won't take yourquarter: try it again. I had the token in myhand when I remembered. I lookedaround warily for signs of six-legged life,but the floor was spotless. All the same, Ilunged for the alarm box and smashed theglass with the little red hammer that hungon a chain.At the top of the ladder I found the catwalks filled with milling workers. A sirenwas whooping but no one had panicked oreven seemed to be in much of a hurry.There was no question of shoving throughthe crowds on those narrow walkways,and so I shuffled along with the rest,toward one of the loading docks and theninto the open air. After 10 minutes or sothe all-clear sounded and we filed back in.I learned soon enough that bug alarmswere not the rare emergencies I had supposed they would be. We had at least twoor three a day, and sometimes they came

in such quick succession we barely hadtime to get back to work before the nextone sounded. Most of the employees tookthem rather like school fire drillsas anofficially sanctioned occasion for goofingoff.It was during the bug drills that I firstmet some of my coworkers: the stackboys, who were a good-hearted rough-house gang, the clerks from the lexicography department, who were constantly in and out of my office revising thedictionaries, the text readers who workeddirectly over my head, and the accountants from the numbers department, onefloor down.In brief conversations outside the gatesI picked up a good deal about the operation of the plant. The stack boys told mc,with more relish than tact, about the fateof my predecessor. It seems the OuterInterpreter's routine checks on the stackcan detect one possible malfunction,called a stack underflow. The oppositeproblem of stack overflow cannot becaught until it's too late. The last OuterInterpreter had been trapped in his roomby a particularly sudden and massiveoverflow and crushed under tons of cafeteria trays. I resolved to keep a closer eyeon the stack.The countinghouse crew I could neverwarm up to. On their breaks they stoodaround playing some numerical parlorgame. (It was something like hangman,but instead of guessing the letters of aword, you guessed the prime factors of alarge number.) The text readers weremore congenial company. It was they whosupplied the tokens that tumbled down mychute. Their job was to scan an incomingstream of text and break it up into individual words, throwing out the interveningspaces and stamping each word onto abrass blank. I asked where the text camefrom in the first place. "From Him."Such passing references led me to sometentative conclusions about Him. Evidently I had stumbled onto a smallreligious cult. Virtually everyone in theplant believed (and the text readersbelieved with much fervor) that somewhere above was a powerful unseen beingwho was the author of all words. He wrotethem in green fire on the glass lid of thesky. Our lot, here below, was to do His

bidding not from fear of punishment orfor hope of reward but simply becausethere was no alternative. I have littlepatience with a doctrine that leaves so little room for free will, but this religion atleast had a measure of humor. The deity ofthe cult was omnipotent but not infallible;indeed He was presented as something ofa chronic blunderer, always sending us onerrands that were bound to come a cropper. As one of the readers put it, He is thesource of all words and of all bugs.I heard rather more about Him than Icared to know, but inquiries about theenigmatic Mr. Next got me nowhere.None of my colleagues admitted to knowing him. There was another mystery onmy mind as well. If I was the Outer Interpreter, there simply had to be an InnerInterpreter. I knew I would not fully graspthis new language until I had found him.

I had been on the job six months when Ibegan taking shortcuts. It was not lazinessthat led me to this; on the contrary, I felt Iwas making a natural and obviousimprovement in my own efficiency. Bythen I had long since memorized the PFAsof all the commoner words. (How could Ihelp learning them, when DUP, SWAP,ROT, DROP and the like came by me ahundred times a day?) It seemed idiotic tocontinue going through the rigmarole of adictionary search for every word. Thesearches were made all the more onerousby the fact that most of the common littlewords were defined near the front of thebook, so that I had to follow a long trail ofword-to-word links to get to them.As a first step I dispensed with following the chain of cross-references. I justflipped directly to the page where I knewthe definition would be found. Soon Idropped even this pretense of followingthe rules. If a colon or an exclamationpoint came down the chute, I alreadyknew the PFA, and so I just wrote it on ablue slip and shipped it off to Mr. Next.There were still unfamiliar words I had to

0 COMPUTERLANGUAGE APRL1986


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were

I started applying common sense to

most days He sentnumbers, and I grewfruitlesses. Hence I began culling the numy. Some care was needed in this.

"word"I know, they

time had beenthe bottleneck

ee it was hinted, with a broad, embarshould take it easy.

ility of a union grievance was

e would be noticed by those in

. I began calling bug alerts on my

VM

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with some bit of nonsense stamped on it,which I knew immediately was neitherword nor number. Rather than waste mytime with the dictionary or the numbersslot, I just broke the glass and headedfor the door.Finally I began making silent corrections. One day the word DORP cameacross my desk. There was no point inlooking it up or trying to pass it off as anumber, and I was tired of fire drills. Iknew well enough what He meant, and soI did Him a favor. I put through the PFAfor DROP.I still don't know how I slipped up. Forsome days I had suspected them of testingme. The same sequence of words keptcoming through over and over, sometimeswith small variations. As soon as I caughton, I made a special effort to be consistent, to treat each word the same wayevery time, to make the same emendations, to pull the alarm in response tothe same errors. It was like trying to sustain a complicated lie under prolongedinterrogation. I may have gotten confusedat a critical moment. It's also possiblesomeone inside betrayed me.I was alert to danger. I kept a wary eyeon the stack and on the stack boys, whohad become openly surly. But the endingthey had planned for mc was subtler thanthat.Early in the day there was a long seriesof undisguised test words. I knew what Hewas up to. Several times He added a set ofterms to the dictionary, then issued a FORGET to delete some of them. I had to keeptrack of which words were defined andwhich had been forgotten at any giveninstant.About lunchtimc there was a pause,then a few more words tumbled in, at aslower rate than usual. There was somebusiness about moving a fence; when thathad been accomplished, another FORGETarrived. The word that followed was one Ihad not seen before: INTERPRET I heldthe token in my hand, I went to the dictionary, I followed the chain of referencesfor page after page. Finally, about halfway to the front, I found it. Coming uponthat word in the dictionary was like seeingmy own name in the telephone book.There's something grand about such public testimony to your own existence, but itcan also make you queasy. If you're in thebook, anyone can get to you. And a word,a name, is so easy to blot out.At that moment I knew I was finished. Iwas to be the instrument of my own execution. I was to write down my own PFAon a blue slip and stuff it down the bluetube. In a matter of seconds the lexicographers would appear and methodically rip me out of the dictionary.


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The guards caught up with me in theof the loading docks.another glass-wall

Mr. Next and I had a long talk. He toldcareer with the comtion he gave mc, Iabout current

of eachnumbers, he said, were

the next addresslist, the one following the PFA weding address and gave the currents to his executive assistant. When

, pass the old saved address to thed until he came to the end of a

There was more. Mr. Next and his staffbut

en his stack and mine, although Ire of it. I was able to. Much of it failed to register simplye I didn't see the point of it all. The

be interpreting. Hemeaning of oneEventually it came time to discuss my

angry, more disappointed

were quick, accurate,us . . . ." He made spider

day you might very well have found yourself in this office, behind this desk."1 knew well enough what this toneimplied. I wasn't sorry to be leaving. As amatter of fact, it seemed to me a great dispensation: I would never again have toDUP. DROP or ROT. I put up a fight onlyout of a sense of fairness. "I think Ideserve some recognition for what I'veaccomplished here," I said. "The efficiency of this plant must be up tenfold.You might weigh that in the balance alongwith my mistakes, whatever they were. Atthe very least I deserve a goodrecommendation."Mr. Next made the saddest eyes. "Iwish I could do that for you, K. Or I wish

you could understand why I can't do it.It's not just a matter of mistakes: you didmake a few, but we could forgive themand work with you to correct them. No.it's something more fundamental. Thetruth is. K. there's no hiding ityouhave become a bug.""K." is a pseudonym of (among others)Brian Hayes, a Minneapolis writerwho sometimes dreams of becoming anInner Interpreter.

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my life as a fourth interpreter

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