Machine Translation Weekly 87: Notes from ACL 2021
The story of the science fiction novel Roadside
Picnic by Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky (mostly known via Tarkovsky’s 1979 film
Stalker) takes place after
an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation. Some aliens stopped by, made a
roadside picnic, and left behind plenty of weird and dangerous objects having
features that contemporary science cannot explain. Although the UN tries to
prevent people from entering the visitation zones before everything gets fully
explored and explained, objects from the zone are traded on a black market.
Soon, the semi-legal discoveries from the zone find use in the industry without
anyone having a good understanding of how the mysterious objects and materials
work.
I got a very similar feeling from this year’s ACL as from this novel. In my not
so elaborated