Impact of technology on Translation and Translation Studies

Ив Гамбье

This short reminder allows us to re-position translation in terms of linguistic policy struggles Translation markets (literary, scientific) are at least doubly structured, both by linguistic borders and by nation-states, and the two do not necessarily coincide. Furthermore, both are respectively structured between center and periphery (for ex., Francophone countries constituting La Francophonie)., and to brush away all specks of naivete concerning the inexorable growth in demand for translation. In this picture we've sketched out, there is no mention made of the diverse possibilities to automate translation; yet, translation automation already satisfies a not insignificant volume of translation, of a more or less urgent nature (see section 3.2). From this perspective, how and up to what point do these possibilities challenge the place, indeed, even the role, of translation? And above all, how do they transform the perception we have of them?

2.1. Denial of translation as a need

For a long time, it seemed as though translation only served the powers that be and the established authorities (royal and religious), as if it were inexistent, hidden away tucked within exchanges of all types -- commercial, scientific, and philosophical, to name but a few (Delisle & Woodsworth, 2012). Non-translation has been discussed and debated (by Toury, for ex., 1995: 23--29). This non-recognition of a translation status for some documents, as is largely the case for televised advertising and news, makes it difficult to grasp the actual volume of translation work taking place, the change in the job market and the amount of graduates to train for the near future (see section 3.3).

2.2. Denial of translation as effort

Denial has always been present, and still is, with regard to translation as an activity requiring effort. Many sponsors, amateurs, self-translators (scholars translating their own articles), and engineers within the language industry continue to consider translation as a mechanical process, the replacement of one word by another, a problem of dictionaries, something they could do themselves if they had the time but which they prefer to pass on, not without condescension, to a cousin who knows languages, or to a bilingual secretary, or, worse, to a professional translator, on the condition that he or she doesn't demand too much financial compensation. The lay person thinks of translation in the equivalence paradigm, or the quest to convey identical meanings (see 4.2). There are strong assumptions underlying such an approach. It assumes, for instance, that two languages “do or can express the same values” (Pym, 2009, p. 82). But a word or concept may connote different meanings in another language or may be absent altogether, so the relationship between the two languages is not necessarily symmetrical. Two words may also refer to the same object, and this would not necessarily convey the intended meaning of the original text. Loyalty to the source text may result in a text that is not easily comprehensible in the target language. The implicit assumptions of the equivalence paradigm usually compel people to criticize a translation because certain words have not been replaced. Thus, the famous set phrase: “Traduttore traditore”. This focus on the lexical similarity of texts, however, is misguided. It does not allow one to consider, describe, and explain the translation decisions and the translated output. The distinction between what is manifest (literal, direct, surface-level) and what is latent (implicit, connotative, underlying) `misreads' the process of translation, and relegates the translator's act of interpreting the content to a task of relative obscurity. Perceiving a text to be translated as nothing more than a linear series of words or phrases no doubt explains why translation has long been considered as inferior, subordinate, second only to the original -- thus the recurring diatribes on “lost in translation”, as if translators could only hope to level out, neutralize, render insipid, in their desperate effort to find equivalence in what could only be an affair of words, without stakes, without cultural complexity. In that perspective, it is easy to understand that the only “translation” to be recognised and legitimized is the literary one, even though the translation of literary texts and genres represent roughly less than 5% of the daily work of the translators.

2.3. Denial of translation as a profession

Denial has likewise been present with regard to translation as a profession, notably by translators themselves who have integrated, incorporated, and internalized various aspects of the “subaltern” in their work, caught between the sacrificial idealism and the calculating materialism of their activity, all the while taking on the labour and servility of their always precarious “vocation” as if this job or this practice required a certain predisposition towards effacement and docility (Kalinowski, 2002; Simeoni, 1998; Buzelin, 2014), even self-destruction (with translators taking pleasure in denigrating themselves among themselves).

Metaphors of translation and images of the translator in the collective imagination are today regularly reproduced in fiction, novels, films, and even in the media (Gambier, 2012). They verge on the stereotypical and on clichйs, with the translator viewed more often as a hardworking hermit, on the margins, an impostor, instead of a mediator, an expert, a creator. Since the end of the Middle Ages (15^th c.), one finds mention of imagery associated with reflection, the pale star, the underside of tapestries, the chameleon, etc.

2.4. Denial of translation as a discipline

Finally, denial has long been present with regard to translation as an autonomous discipline. Even today, the status of Translation Studies (TS) remains an ambiguous one within university institutions: it is often caught between languages and literature. Furthermore, many of the translator training programs emerging and multiplying over the past few years have been reluctant to give Translation Studies a place, reducing translation to a collection of knowledge and tricks of the trade, unfit for self-reflexivity. Such ambiguity reflects the malaise of universities when confronted with interdisciplinary, intercultural communication, and linguistic diversity, even when at this very moment the globalization of business and trade, and migration, continuously hurl challenges at most of our societies.

Will the types of denial mentioned resist the transformations currently underway and which make the translator an ever more “dematerialized” individual, one no longer reducible to mere pens and dictionaries? Before answering the question, let's look at the recent past of Translation Studies.

TS has clearly experienced “turns” over the past three decades (linguistic, cultural, ideological, semiotic, cognitive, sociological, etc.), turns which are somewhat dizzying, as if this bulimia of bends, turns and detours were more a condition of driving while under the influence. Such turns are a certain angle, a reductionist view to investigate translation as a complex reality, a way of splitting up our knowledge, a risk of fragmen- tation of our field. Yet, at the same time, there remains an underlying concern, at times an outright worry, about being recognized by the university and by other disciplines.

These turns have also been impacted by fashions, with their inhibiting effect: see for instance the dominating reference to Vinay-Darbelnet in Quйbec or the interpretive theory in France, in the years 1980--1990; the dominating reference to the Skopos theory and the constant use of the Think Aloud Protocol in years 1990; the dominating reference to Venuti's agenda in the years 2000; the dominating reference to Bourdieu or the cognitive framework in the last years. The shift has been from a focus on text to a focus on the translator (black box and social agent), even though, at the same time, there is insistence of dealing with translation as a service, as an industry -- thus, the current paradox to give up textualist approaches as if translators were in sole command.

-- Regarding the underlying ideologie of the Skopos theory which fits the efficiency of communication in a mode of competitive production, of the concept of agent (and the risk management), of localisation resorting to workflow.

-- Regarding the status of working languages, concealing languages less widely used and less taught and languages of migrants (e.g. Chinese, Korean in a bilingual Canada; the position of Arabic in the translations and interpretations in France).

-- Regarding the translating body -- the translating act being both incorporated (with rhythms, tensions and stress) and incorporating (the document to be translated is « assimilated », sometimes up to cannibalism).

Today, we operate in a more technologized society, within a complex, competitive system of client and user expectations, tools, and new forms of organizations and work conditions. The new collaborative economy is changing dramatically production and consumption of goods and services. It also challenges the concept of profession, as if we were pushed back to be on piece-work, like in the 19^th century. Services such as Airbnb (an online marketplace where people can list, find, book and rent vacation homes), Uber (a multinational online transportation network company) offer occasional jobs and disturb steady and regulated professions. On the other hand, they also tend to be more and more professionalized, moving away from their original, starting idea. Moreover, the difference between producers and consumers is getting blurred: you can be “prosumers” of information, data, news, reports, services regarding cars, parking, flats, food, equipment, etc.

It is not the place to deal with the paradoxes, drawbacks and contradictions of the collaborative economy Collaborative economy has been the butt of criticism regarding among other things the labor law, the tax law, competition rules.. What we would like to underscore here and now is the impact of the changes in the perception of a profession. The Internet, artificial intelligence, robotics, production in 3D, and the development of fab labs and maker spaces change employment, disrupt professions. What would be tomorrow the use of civil servants, translators, travel agents, insurance brokers, salesmen, lawyers, chemists, journalists, drivers, maybe even teachers if they can be replaced by different automation systems? Not only manual workers, technicians but also white-collar workers are under threat.

Сomputer-aided translation (CAT) tools and Machine Translation (MT) (TAUS, 2013: 15--24, 37--40) have revolutionized, and continue to revolutionize, the practice of translation and they are altering both the perception of translation amongst users and the conceptualization of translation amongst producers and theorists. For the general user, automatic translation programmes, whether online or on a smartphone, give the impression (indeed even provide a reality) that translation is an instantaneous activity. The quality they achieve can be quite high, depending on genre conventions and language proximity, and then the question becomes “do I pay for a slightly better human translation when I can get a reasonable one for free?” The role of the translator has shifted and one can anticipate a time not too far off when the intervention of the human translator will be almost entirely centred on post-editing/quality assuring MT output or on providing very high quality translations of quality-sensitive texts such as publicity material, literary texts and legal documentation.

1. Machine translation offered through programs available on the Web, and where human intervention is limited.

2. Amateur translation⁴ that is also automatized but where the user provides his or her feedback, and at times attempts to improve the performance of the MT results -- without there being any specific translation training involved, based on linguistic intuition. Within this category, two types can be differentiated:

a. Translation by fans (fan translation, fan subbing, fan dubbing, scan-trans) who deliberately choose a manga, an animated film, a video game... and proceed to translate (subtitle, dub) it in order for others to know about it as soon as possible. These fans are not translation professionals -- hence, they The terminology used in English is redundant and vague: community / crowdsourcing / collaborative / citizen / paraprofessional / user-generated / volunteer translations, in addition to the 3CT proposed by Common Sense Advisory, to wit: community, crowdsourced and collaborative translation. transgress certain conventions and respected norms of the profession (for example, for subtitling, this touches on the number of lines, scrolling speed, position, typographical characters used, gloss additions, etc.). Neither are they all `pirates', as some of them do respect the copyright holders and refrain from circulating their translated version on the Web as soon as the book or film has officially been released.

b. Participatory or collaborative translation (crowdsourcing), used -- for example -- in the localization of software, Web sites or for translating articles, reports, literary texts and interviews. For this collective, unpaid effort, volunteer and anonymous (or sometimes not) participants turn to linguistic competence and during their available time here and there translate a sentence, a paragraph, a page... all of which can be retranslated and revised by others, until the entire project is finished. These volunteers translate once, or can translate hundreds of times, thanks to such tools as Traduwiki, Wikitranslate and Google Translate. Social media or socio-digital networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) take advantage of the passing craze in order to become more accessible to more people.

3. Teamwork that is carried out on a same, single document by professionals places dematerialized computer resources at the common disposal of all. This includes document research, terminology, re-reading and revision. It is manifest in such sites as Proz, Translator's Cafй, etc. “Cloud” cannot be confused with “crowd”.

4. Translation with open source tools, which are not necessarily free but which can be adapted to certain needs and redistributed to others, can be carried out by professionals, on a full-time basis.

5. Volunteer networked translation can also be carried out by professionals (that is to say, those who have been trained for translation and/or have experience in translation), for example through networks such as Babel, ECOS, Translators without Borders, etc. (Gambier, 2007a). These activist translators work for a specific cause, and respond to the needs expressed by NGOs (Non-governmental organisations) and other associations. Their network is aligned with a specific social cause / activity, or allied with actions expressing certain values.

3.3. A multi-faceted market

The market evolves according to demand, to the means used to meet these demands, and to the nature of the relationship that binds the translator to the commissioner of translations (Gouadec, 2002: 87--115; 2007: 120--145).

This market may be local, open and accessible to everybody, i.e. to anybody, from the person knowledgeable about the language needed, to the person able to manage a given tool or technology. This market is also fragmented, offering small irregularly paced contracts, and encompassing a variety of texts of unequal tenor and length -- from hotel pamphlets to promotional prospectuses of SMEs. It is equally the domain of freelancers -- of amateurs (with hardly any training), beginners (new graduates, whether in translation or not), and professionals alike, where the latter are solidly established, have one or more working languages, and have been successful in gaining the loyalty of a certain number of regular clients.

A protected market implies a demand that is more concrete, one that touches on issues of quality requirements and on the translation of documents representing financial and commercial stakes, at times bound by security or legal constraints. Clients tend to be more well-informed, wanting their operations and maintenance manuals, marketing brochures, takeover bids, or Web sites to respect certain preferences of terminology and protocol of format. Likewise within this market we find translation agencies and companies, operating either with salaried in-house translators or functioning as a network of experienced, independent translators. The protected market can be regional, or national, and is configured mainly by medium-sized industrial and business enterprises, drawn in by the export field. In Finland, this type of market demands bi-directional translations, to and from foreign languages.

-- Compare the ecological prints of Western translators with those in India translating the same text, or interpreters who travel versus those conducting videoconference interpreting (costs, productivity, and environment)

With all the changes implied by ICT, including the multimodal text, we can notice a multiplication of labels created nowadays for “translation”. This outbreak in denominations has not yet occurred in all societies and in all languages. We are not thinking here of traditional categories such as specialized or literary translation, conference or community interpreting. Rather, we are thinking of the labels imposed from within diverse professional milieus -- by sponsors and commissioners of translations, all the while denying the word itself, and opting instead for: localization, adaptation, multilingual documentation, editing, trans-editing, multilingual technical writing, language mediation, versioning, revision, co-writing (legal texts for ex.), transcreation (Ray & Kelly, 2010), etc. The burgeoning functions to be carried out at the same time (documentation, terminology, project management, website design, editing and proofing), the advanced specialization required (by domain, tool, types of document) “define the sets of knowledge and specific competences for jobs as engineers of multimedia, multilingual communication” (Gouadec, 2002: 70).

The multiplication of labels to talk about translation is intriguing: it might also destabilize TS: what is then its object of investigation? However the destabilisation of TS has gone hand in hand with the expansion of the discipline in the past twenty years or so and has happily permitted a much broader perspective on the role of the translator. But let's come back to professions. How should we understand the situation and also the new hierarchy behind those labels? The term “translation” is rejected because it implies a formal transfer, a word-for-word work and because it goes with the traditional image of the translator as a subservient or “subaltern” worker (see 2.2 and 2.3). TS has deconstructed for some time now this definition and this image, and nowadays we deal with a concept of translation that recovers creativity, voice, interpretation, commitment. Nevertheless, today, different sectors use different labels, e.g. transcreation in the advertising industry A number of ads and TV news, for instance, are produced through a translation process but are not perceived as “translations” by their copywriters.. In a way, the job market lags behind research but also associations are slow to update their categorization since most of them still rely on differences between literary and non-literary (technical, commercial, medical, legal) translators. To limit TS or our enquiries to institutionally visible or academically prestigious forms of translation is counter-productive: the inheritance of literary and religious texts is not obsolete but must be questioned to better include new practices.

How to redefine “translation” while not only practices are changing but the discussion in TS is becoming more and more international, opening up to other cultures (Tymoczko 2005, 2007)? To the concepts used in the past in Western Europe (mimesis, appropriation, imitation, commentary) must be added many concepts used in different cultural spaces of the contemporary world: Indian, Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Malaysian, etc. (reversal, transmigration, metamorphosis, substitution, etc.) (Chesterman 2006; Gambier & Stecconi 2019). Translation is a polymorphous concept to be negotiated, requiring to question the epistemological and social relevance of the studies in translation -- in the way data, methods of investigation are selected, in the ways the scholar (practitioner and epistemic subject) takes a stand on the practices, the contingent realities. As long as translations were limited to conventional genres (contracts, patents, articles, instructions, pages of fiction), in well-defined domains (economic, scientific, military, agricultural, energy, etc.), for clear needs, analytic and interpretative grids were possible from your own experiences. How is it now when environments are changing with ICT, when documents are multimodal, when constraints in production and distribution of international multilingual communications are far from the known models (Pym 2004)?

4.2. Paradigm shifts in Translation Studies

Two paradigms are evolving, and justify to some degree the current multiplication of labels created for “translation”. On one hand, the more conventional conceptualization of translation that has endured for centuries through the paradigm of equivalence, has evolved into one more oriented toward the public or audience targeted, i.e. the paradigm of the `cultural turn'. It exists concurrently with another changing paradigm, one which reflects the platforms and mediums through which the activity of translation is now carried out. In this sense, the paradigm of the book (upon which the paradigm of equivalence is based) transforms into one of the digital and Web. Within the “cultural turn” in TS, several perspectives in particular have contributed to the critique of the long standing equivalence paradigm -- Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury, 2012); the Skopos theory (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013); and cultural politics (Venuti, 2008), among others. Translation is thus viewed as a process of re-contextualization, as a purposeful action. Translators consider and balance diverse factors during the translation process, in order to achieve a communicative purpose, and their translations materialize as functionally adequate in the target culture. The entire decision-making process is bound to considerations that involve the client end-receiver. Meaning is no longer considered as a mere invariant in the source text, but rather as culturally embedded, with a need to be interpreted. Translation becomes not just a lexical hurdle to overcome, but the result of connections between text, context, and myriad agents.

Could TS become a trans-discipline, a transversal object of inquiry, common to psychologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, economists, etc., shaking up at last the established disciplines? Nonetheless, must we have separated Translation Studies, Adaptations Studies, Intercultural Studies, Transfer Studies, Knowledge Management, Internet Studies, Web Science, Mediology, to name a few new fields? This does not imply that TS has to be cannibal of neighbouring disciplines. One has to acknowledge the complexity of communications and behaviours.

Another aspect is the institutionalisation of translation (with training programmes, associations, codes of ethics) and of TS (with research projects, doctoral schools, conferences and other international meetings, journals, specialised series, etc.) (Gambier 2007b) This institutionalisation has been partly criticized recently for being too much Eurocentric (van Doorslaer & Flynn 2011). Neither translation nor TS have clear-cut borders. However, for institutional and logistic reasons, they are often strongly marked geographically, assimilated to a given space -- i.e. for a journal such as TIS of the American Association of Interpreting and Translation Studies, for an association such as CATS/ACT in Canada, for an article such as “Italian TS”.

There is a dual move today: the national, regional associations coexist with specialised ones. On the one hand, we have associations which continue to believe that the job is singular, the corporation is homogenous and depends on the passport; on the other hand, we have associations based on domains (legal, audio-visual, medicine, commerce, etc.) or based on the status (freelances, authorised translators, employees), and we should not forget websites such as Proz, Translators Cafй, Aquarius. In this fragmented landscape (there are more than 100 associations in the 28 EU countries), no one asks the question why to translate and not to learn more languages, to use passive bilingualism (see section 1).

All these associations are facing new problematics and new challenges, very different from what was happening in the late 1980. Networking is now preferred to the gatherings with formal rules and local branches. Today a certain number of TS associations exist: CATS/ACT, Canada, since 1987, EST since 1992, ABRAPT (Brazsil, 1992), Japan Association of Interpretation Studies (JAI, 2000), the Nida Institute within the American Bible Society (2002), AIETI (since 2003) for the Iberian Peninsula, ATISA (USA, 2003), IATIS (2004), SEPTET (Sociйtй d'йtudes des pratiques et thйories en traduction, 2005) and then come specialised associations, such as EAMT / for machine translation, AIIC / for conference interpreters. All these associations search for more visibility, as the transnational associations of translation companies, such as EUATC (European Union of Associations of Translation Companies). Rather than waiting for an utopian international organisation, they could gather in a unique network in order to lobby public and financial authorities, to struggle against any kind of censorship and violation of human rights (especially the freedom of expression) and to promote research TS in the international rankings of publications, etc.