4 - Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding “otherness”

Summary

Abraham Wald (1902–1960) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Jew. As a Jew raised in a religious family he couldn’t attend school on Saturday and therefore was homeschooled by his parents. This homeschooling was extremely successful as Wald graduated from the University of Vienna with a Ph.D. in mathematics. Wald was forced to flee to the USA when the Nazis came into power and developed his academic career in that welcoming country.

In retrospect, the Nazis’ “thesis” of the Aryan race’s superiority over the Jews was powerfully refuted when Jewish scientists, such as those who led the Manhattan Project, became the cutting edge of the war efforts. We could not imagine the war efforts of the USA without Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and many others.

During the Second World War, Wald made his own personal contribution to the war efforts (Mangel and Samaniego 1984 ). The context of his contribution is extremely interesting. The American airplanes that returned from the front were, naturally, damaged by antiaircrat artillery. As a solution the army sought to add armor to the planes. However, covering the whole airplane’s belly and wings with armor would necessarily result in a weight increase that would have fatal consequences. Therefore, as a commonsensical solution, the army considered adding armor only to areas that statistically showed the most damage.