conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Peter, Penrose, Olivia entitled The Same Old Story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Same Old Story: A prostitute is abandoned by an unknown man at a hospital, dangerously in labor.\nShe dies as the doctors perform a caesarean section, but the child ages rapidly in minutes, soon dead having aged to the likes of an 90-year-old man.\nOlivia Dunham (Anna Torv), Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), and Walter Bishop (John Noble), new members of the Fringe division, are called to investigate by division head Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), believing the case to be part of "The Pattern", a string of mysterious incidents.\nThe woman is identified as having recently left a local motel, and Olivia finds evidence that points to a past serial murder case she and her former partner John Scott were not able to solve.\nOlivia explains to Peter that their murderer would paralyze his victims, young women, then make an incision along their face to extract a piece of brain material, killing the victim in the process.\nWalter takes both corpses back to his lab and determines that the woman had only been pregnant minutes before giving birth, her child having accelerated aging disease.\nWalter is reminded of having previously done work in this field, and remembers where he stashed his car that contains the related files.\nOnce they are retrieved, Olivia makes a connection to the pituitary gland which controls growth in humans, and informs Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) to monitor recent cases where the victims\' pituitary gland has been removed.\nOlivia and Peter turn to an expert in progeria, dr Penrose (Mark Blum), to trying to learn more about rapid aging, but dr Penrose cannot help them further, though Peter suspects he is hiding something.\nUnseen by the Fringe division, dr Penrose visits an abandoned warehouse and meets the murderer, Christopher (Derek Cecil), his son, who suffers from rapid aging syndrome.\nPenrose warns Christopher to be careful and that they only need one more woman to complete the process.\nBy this time, Charlie has found a recent murder victim killed in the same fashion as Olivia\'s serial murderer.\nAt Walter\'s lab, they identify the pituitary gland has been removed.\nThey rationalize the murderer must extract hormones from the glands to slow down his own aging process.\nWalter hypothesizes they can discover the location of the crime by looking at the images left in the woman\'s optical nerves induced by the paralyzing sedative.\nBorrowing an electronic pulse camera from Massive Dynamic, they discover the image of a suspension bridge near Stoughton and identify the likely location from which it was viewed—the same warehouse that dr Penrose visited.\nThe FBI converge on the building, and Olivia and Peter find Penrose about to cut into another victim.\nOlivia chases off after Christopher, who eventually succumbs to his rapid aging and dies, while Peter, after nicking Penrose with a bullet, confers with Walter to apply a makeshift defibrillator to bring the victim back to life.\nAs they wrap up the case, Olivia, Peter, and Walter complete forms to finalize their position in the Fringe division.\nWhen Peter is out of earshot, Walter learns from Olivia that the FBI medical files on Peter\'s childhood are void of any details.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Same Old Story
  Readers of contemporary fiction translated into English rarely enjoy the benefit of such cultural playing-field-levelling information. Whether they actively feel the lack of it is a moot point. It may well be that what is true in so many other areas of life is also true here – namely that when you are not conditioned to expect something, you don't miss it if you don't get it. A case in point is the recent smash-hit bestseller trilogy by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so smoothly translated , and so free of the distractions just described, that it would not surprise me if a large number of readers of its English version were virtually oblivious to the fact that it was a translation that they were reading, in spite of the fact that it contains many allusions to Swedish life and culture which would elude them. Interestingly, its original title, Men Who Hate Women, was for some reason clearly considered inappropriate for English-speaking readers.
  If it should be objected that I am comparing apples with oranges, I would concede only that, in fact, the comparison is between different varieties of apple.
  The extra problem posed is not the same as the problem which faces a translator who undertakes the entirely different task of translating the whole of the original poem from which these passages have been taken.
  However, in the case of these isolated excerpts, it is clear to me that priority should be given to presenting the sense of the passage to your readers so that they can understand its relevance to the surrounding context. Any attempt to render the passage in verse in order to preserve the style, charm, humour, beauty, quirkiness or any other aesthetic value of the original – especially if it rhymes – would inevitably be at the expense of the sheer meaning and relevance of the quotation to its context.
  An elevated and noble-sounding precept, but like so many such, it tends to crumble under closer inspection and disintegrate under a microscope. To wit.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In the event, my judgement call, or trade-off, was to leave the ipsissima verba exactly the way they are. Any other course would have been tantamount to an editorial comment or a lengthy footnote along the very lines of what I have just written.
  A reviewer of Oblomov wrote: "Purists may object that Pearl has strayed too far from what are often straightforward Russian words." Again, the only way of responding to this comment is to invite the "purists" into the labyrinth of the translator's thought processes as he deconstructs the seemingly innocent and unexceptionable expression "straightforward Russian words".
  Clearly, here the reviewer is dissociating himself from this stricture. Whether the three words in question are his own, or the words of one of the "purists", they require a great deal of elucidation, and would benefit greatly from reference to specific examples. Part of the problem lies precisely in the use of the word "words". To put it briefly, the stricture implies that it is individual words that have to be translated, rather than a sequence of words in the form of a phrase or a sentence – especially in the course of literary translation, rather than, say, the Canadian weather forecast – one of the first machine translations (between English and French) to survive the process intact and usable. How one translates individual "words" depends heavily in their immediate as well as their larger context.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How one translates individual "words" depends heavily in their immediate as well as their larger context. Any other course would have been tantamount to an editorial comment or a lengthy footnote along the very lines of what I have just written.
  A reviewer of Oblomov wrote: "Purists may object that Pearl has strayed too far from what are often straightforward Russian words." Again, the only way of responding to this comment is to invite the "purists" into the labyrinth of the translator's thought processes as he deconstructs the seemingly innocent and unexceptionable expression "straightforward Russian words".
  Clearly, here the reviewer is dissociating himself from this stricture. Whether the three words in question are his own, or the words of one of the "purists", they require a great deal of elucidation, and would benefit greatly from reference to specific examples. Part of the problem lies precisely in the use of the word "words". To put it briefly, the stricture implies that it is individual words that have to be translated, rather than a sequence of words in the form of a phrase or a sentence – especially in the course of literary translation, rather than, say, the Canadian weather forecast – one of the first machine translations (between English and French) to survive the process intact and usable.In the event, my judgement call, or trade-off, was to leave the ipsissima verba exactly the way they are.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They also wore a wide variety of garments, only some of which happen to coincide with or resemble what today's English speakers are wearing, while there are other items of clothing which simply have no counterpart today in the target culture, partly because of climatic differences, partly because of changes of fashion and mores, and partly because modern English-speaking countries have long since shed their peasantry.
  To mention but one: sometimes, in dialogue, Russian can be very elliptical and laconic, but an interlocutor of the relevant time and place would have enjoyed the benefit of the speaker's tone, intonation, gestures, facial expression and body language in order to capture the full flavour of the words themselves. Therefore, in order to offset that disadvantage, and to maintain equivalence, more – sometimes many more – words have to be used in the translation.
  My heartfelt gratitude to Margarita Razenkova, whose unstinting, tireless, loyal and painstaking assistance went far beyond the call of duty.
  Many thanks to Victor Prokofiev, Oleg Semyonov and Marina Kuzina for their corroboration and guidance at moments of doubt.
  And belated thanks here, instead of at the right time and in the right place, to my good friend, Jennifer Klopp, for her contribution to my work on Oblomov.