'I left the city, riverside down to meet the boat alone waiting, not knowing when it would come.' (2012).'I left the city, river bottom, to meet the boat alone waiting, not knowing when to come.' (2010).The first line is Salí de la ciudad, ribera abajo, al encuentro solitario del barco que aguardaba, sin saber cuándo vendría.

Which made it the perfect Google Translate test case. It's been translated into German, Italian and Polish, but has never before been published in English. In the Spanish-speaking world, Zama is an awe-inspiring, foundational work that has powerfully influenced generations of writers from Julio Cortázar, Roberto Bolaño, and Juan José Saer, to Sergio Chejfec, Daniel Saldaña Paris and Alvaro Enrigue. Connecting the original line to its existing translation is 'an impressive trick for a computer,' Bellos noted, 'but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.' And of course both novels are widely available in English. It's a search engine, scanning a massive corpus of already-translated material for correlations with the phrase it's currently processing. The problem with this, as David Bellos pointed out in an Op Ed follow-up, is that Google Translate doesn't translate. The idea came from a 2010 New York Times piece that put Google Translate through its paces by having it 'translate' the first lines of famous novels: Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. Every so often, I'd run the first line through Google Translate, to see what it came up with. However, during the six years I worked on putting Antonio Di Benedetto's masterpiece into English, I performed an experiment. No, Google Translate was in no way useful to my translation of the 1956 Argentine novel Zama: let's get that out of the way first thing. Esther Allen brilliantly translates Di Benedetto's novel, and talks about the six-year process of bringing the book to U.S. The novel, about a provincial magistrate of the Spanish crown named Zama, is a riveting portrait of a mind deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close. A classic of Argentine literature, Antonio Di Benedetto's Zama is available for the first time in English.

Google translate old male voice