Saturday, June 27, 2009

Translating the Constitution of Mars into Farsi

Following my post of June 22nd, "Kim Stanley Robinson digs the Persian poet Rumi," I started playing around with the new English-to-Persian (Farsi) option that was added to Google Translate last week. In testing the feature, I decided to translate into Persian (Farsi) the first section of “The Constitution of Mars,” a piece of short fiction written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published in his awesome collection The Martians (1999). First, the English version:
We the people of Mars have gathered here on Pavonis Mons in the year 2128 to write a constitution which will serve as a legal framework for an independent planetary government. We intend this constitution to be a flexible document subject to change over time in the light of experience and changing historical conditions, but assert here that we hope to establish a government that will forever uphold the following principles:
the rule of law; the equality of all before the law; individual freedom of movement, association, and expression; freedom from political or economic tyranny; control of one's work life and the value thereof; communal stewardship of the planet's natural resources; and respect for the planet's primal heritage.
And now, the same paragraph translated into Persian (Farsi) using Google Translate:
ما به مردم از مریخ را در اینجا در کوه Pavonis در سال 2128 جمع آوری و نوشتن یک قانون اساسی که به عنوان یک چهارچوب قانونی برای یک دولت مستقل به سیاره خدمت می کنند. قصد ما از این قانون اساسی به عنوان یک سند قابل انعطاف برای تغییر در طول زمان در پرتو تجربه و تغییر شرایط تاریخی ، اما ادعا در اینجا است که ما امیدواریم برای ایجاد یک دولت حمایت خواهد کرد که برای همیشه از اصول زیر است : حکومت قانون ؛ و برابری همه در مقابل قانون ؛ آزادی فردی جنبش ، تشکل ، و آزادی بیان ؛ آزادی از ظلم و ستم سیاسی یا اقتصادی ؛ کنترل از زندگی یکی از کار و ارزش آن ؛ نظارت عمومی از منابع طبیعی کره زمین است ؛ و احترام به میراث این سیاره بسیار قدیمی است.
Note that Persian (Farsi) is written and read from right to left, but when I cut the translated passage from Google Translate and paste it in Google Blogger, the words seem to get placed in left-to-right format. The same thing happens if I cut from MS Word and past to Google Blogger. Therefore, I don't think this is really an accurate translation of the first section of the Constitution of Mars.

In any case, “The Constitution of Mars” is posted in a forum on the anarchist website Anti-State.com. I haven’t analyzed the entire text, but a spot-check seems to indicate that the text is the same as the original document published in Robinson's The Martians. Enjoy!

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