The Cat’s Meow - Feline Translations

Modern trends of posthumanism are increasingly changing the relationship between humans, animals and machines. Technology can become an intermediary in the communication between people and pets. The possibility of using artificial intelligence without needing to recover the ontology and semantics of the feline language, allows one to use it for the „translation“ of cats‘ talk. A necessary condition for this is the presence of a language. As with other languages in the multilingual environment, testing the results is difficult, as one can only rely on circumstantial evidence to judge the correctness of the translation.  Here, particular attention is paid to the work of the application that renders human speech into feline, as well as the effectiveness and reliability of, for example, MeowTalk to translate from feline into human language. To this end, 143 cats were studied aged 3 to 8 years, of which 30 were female. Of these 143 cats, 74% appeared to respond to the sounds generated by the app. During the experiment, the application translated the cats' meowing in different ways, for example, “I'm on the hunt,” “My love, I'm here,” and “Let me relax.” Inversely, the pets were interested in the sounds made by the app. This suggests that cats perceive these sounds as real cat “language.” As a result, it was concluded that the application is partly functional, but it remains an open question whether it can serve as a true  translator from feline language. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that technologies can become real intermediaries in the communication of people and animals.