Impact of technology on Translation and Translation Studies

Abstract

<p>The landscape in translation and interpreting is changing deeply and rapidly. For a long time, but not<br />necessarily everywhere, translation was denied as a need (except for the political and religious powers),<br />as effort (translation being defined as a kind of mechanical work, as substitution of words), and as a profession<br />(translators embodying a subaltern position). Technology is bringing in certain changes in attitudes<br />and perceptions with regards international, multilingual and multimodal communications. This article tries<br />to define the changes and their consequences in the labelling and characterisation of the different practices.<br />It is organised in five sections: first, we recall that translation and interpreting are only one option<br />in international relations; then, we explain the different denials of translation in the past (or the refusal<br />to recognize the different values of translation). In the third section, we consider how and to what extent<br />technology is transforming today practices and markets. The ongoing changes do not boil solely to developments<br />in Machine Translation (which started in the 1960s): community, crowdsourced/collaborative translation<br />and volunteer translation encompass different practices. In many cases, users provide their own<br />translations, with or without formal qualifications in translation. The evolution is not only technical but<br />also economic and social. In addition, the fragmentation and the diversity of practices do have an impact<br />on a multi-faceted market. In the fourth section, we emphasize that there are nowadays different concepts<br />of translation and competitive paradigms in Translation Studies. Finally, we tackle the organisational<br />challenge of the field, since the institutionalisation of translation and Translation Studies cannot remain<br />the same as when there was a formal consensus on the concept of translation.<br />Keywords: translation, Translation Studies, concepts of translation, paradigms in Translation<br />Studies<br />For<br /></p>