Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17

Abstract

The postwar academy was awash with interdisciplinary work in cybernetics, information theory, and cryptography—none of which are specifically linguistic fields. But in Warren Weaver’s revolutionary idea that digital computers could translate texts between human languages, these fields converged in a view of language as simply one form of information, with translation becoming no more complicated than coding and transmission. This unlimited translatability contrasted with the common interpretations of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis as a radical relativism that imagined speakers of different languages as trapped in their separate and incommensurable thought worlds—that is, as a theory of untranslatability. This chapter approaches Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) as a perceptive working through of the relationship between the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Weaver’s ideas about language, information, and translation. By entangling these theories in an sf plot, Delany had to attend to aspects of them that were rarely addressed by academic critics working within and talking across scholarly disciplines. The novel’s insights come not only from Delany’s theoretical acumen, but also from his need to think about these theories in terms of character motivation, thematic coherence, and narrative closure.