It’s not an exaggeration to say that translators are obsessed with context. If you ask how to translate a word, a translator will almost invariably say, “What’s the context?” Why? Because words often have different shades of meaning — or even completely different meanings — depending on how they’re used.

• What exactly do you mean by nice? Is it a nice hat, a nice person, a nice idea? Nice actually means something different in each of these cases.
• If you’re trying to translate the English word fence, do you have in mind the white-picket kind, or the selling-stolen-goods kind?
• What about driver? Do you mean the person behind the wheel, a force driving the economy, or a computer component?

Context is necessary because words aren’t understood in isolation. They’re understood in relation to the other words around them. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think context is key to understanding life in general.

Art in Context

A while back, I saw a tweet by an art critic about what he considered to be the ugliest public art in New York City: a giant sculpture of a Dalmatian balancing a life-size taxicab on its nose.

Looking at the photo, I thought, Ugh, he’s right. This is really tacky. Why did anyone spend money on this? But a lot of people replied to his tweet pointing out that the sculpture is in front of a children’s hospital in Midtown. There were several stories of children being reassured by this whimsical artwork during a scary trip to the hospital. The location of this sculpture — its context — totally changes its meaning. It’s not there to please art critics or make an aesthetic statement. It’s there to make children feel welcomed and comforted when they go to the hospital.

Umpiring in Context

Last year, the New Yorker published a fascinating article by Zach Helfand about a computerized umpire system that is being tested in the minor leagues to call balls and strikes. While the system claims great accuracy, it’s removing the human element from the game. Minor-league umpire Fred DeJesus describes something called “pitch management,” which a living, breathing umpire can do, but a machine can’t: “If I start to feel that the game is dragging and we’re not getting a flow, you’re gonna have more strikes called. Not anymore. It used to be, if you have two borderline pitches in a row, one gets called a strike, one gets called a ball. Everybody is equally upset, and everybody’s equally happy.”

The Human Touch

Measuring where a ball goes in space is an easy task for a computer, but determining what a word means is not. However, even though robo-umpires improve accuracy, critics still feel that they’re taking the fun out of the game. When watching a baseball game unfold, we want to feel that real judgment is at work. Judgment implies seeing the context of the game as a whole. Seeing the artwork in its place in the urban fabric. Seeing the word relate to the words that come before and after.

Algorithms are great at following rules, but the interesting parts of life involve more than just applying a sterile set of rules. Art, baseball, language — these human endeavors mean something to us only if we understand the context of their creation and their use.

Top photo by Wally Gobetz via Flickr, car driver photo by Peter Fazekas via Pexels, computer driver photo by Phiraphon Srithakae via Pexels, umpire photo by Pixabay via Pexels.