Calls for papers

Following the International Conference on Field Research on Translation and Interpreting: Practices, Processes, Networks (FIRE-TI) that was held at the University of Vienna in February 2022, we are now calling for contributions for an edited volume under the provisional title Field Research on Translation and Interpreting to be included in a prestigious series by an international publishing house. The book will be a peer-reviewed volume of full-length contributions showcasing the practice and potentials of field research in translation and interpreting studies. Deadline for abstracts: 1 August 2022 For more information, click here

Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University cordially invites you to celebrate its 25th anniversary by revisiting the place, role and impact of translation in the broad, dynamic social and multicultural communicational context, and to take part at the international conference on Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility which will include the international workshop on Multiple Perspectives of Translation Research. Nowadays global processes invite ever-increasing multicultural interaction, exchange of ideas and multinational coordination, therefore the demand for translation and its significance are growing, respectively raising visibility of translation as mediation, and of its participants. As translation never takes place in the vacuum and the need for it emanates in the contexts that are saturated with various ideologies, cultures and stands, the very process of translation, its product, and participants are affected by these contexts and make an impact on them. Recent geopolitical changes, fast-growing communication technology, media intervention into the spheres that used to belong exclusively to home affairs, global quest for information and its deliberation in social networks highlighted the questions of reliability of translation and trust in it, and emphasised responsibility of translators and translation technologies. The collisions of ideologies, combined with the ethical stances that translators have to assume in response have drawn attention to the risks associated with translation situations that extend beyond the text and directly affect the participants of those situations. These developments consequently touch the field of Translation Studies which, as it is rightly noted by Susan Bassnett and David Johnston, is necessarily situated in the context of the ‘issues alive in the perceptions and relationships of our world today.’ We hope to expand the discussion on interrelation between translation, ideology and ethics, by inviting papers addressing, but not limited to the following questions: How do ideologies affect the field of translation? What is characteristic of the process of translation in crisis situations? What are translator’s ethical choices in crisis situations? What are the ideological assumptions and implications of translation from/into major and minor languages? How does translation influence our positions and values, and form our images and perception of ourselves and others? How do we perceive history of translation? How does the history of translation function in the collective and individual memory? What is a rendition quality of ideological and ethical contents in human and machine translation? Who is to be held responsible for reliability of translation? How is the notion of translation ethics changing? What skills are to be acquired by translators in the developing situation when they cease being perceived as merely a passive channel of transmission and assume a more active role of a communication moderator?  How do these changes affect translator training? How do Translation Studies respond to the changing milieu? What problems and ethical challenges do researchers in TS face? How is the inquiry into translation enriched by the multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and supradisciplinary research approach? Is the translation research trusted in the view of ideological and ethical differences? What are the most relevant perspectives in nowadays translation research? Deadline for abstracts: 30 May 2022 For more information, click here

The conference will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to phraseology and invites submissions on a wide range of topics, covering, but not limited to: computational, corpus-based, psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches to the study of phraseology, and practical applications in computational linguistics, translation, lexicography and language learning, teaching and assessment. These topics cover include the following: Computational approaches to the study of multiword expressions, e.g. automatic detection, classification and extraction of multiword expressions; automatic translation of multiword expressions; computational treatment of proper names; multiword expressions in NLP tasks and applications such as parsing, machine translation, text summarisation, term extraction, web search; Corpus-based approaches to phraseology, e.g. corpus-based empirical studies of phraseology, task-orientated typologies of phraseological units (e.g. for annotation, lexicographic representation, etc.), annotation schemes, applications in applied linguistics and more specifically translation, interpreting, lexicography, terminology, language learning, teaching and assessment (see also below); Phraseology in mono- and bilingual lexicography and terminography, e.g. new forms of presenting phraseological units in dictionaries and other lexical resources based on corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches; domain-specific terminology; Phraseology in translation and cross-linguistic studies, e.g. use parallel and comparable corpora for translating of phraseological units; phraseological units in computer-aided translation; study of phraseology across languages; Phraseology in specialised languages and language dialects, e.g. phraseology of specialised languages, study of phraseological use in different dialects or varieties of a specific language; Phraseology in language learning, teaching and assessment: e.g. second language/bilingual processing of phraseological units and formulaic language; phraseological units in learner language; Theoretical and descriptive approaches to phraseology, e.g. phraseological units and the lexis-grammar interface, the relevance of phraseology for theoretical models of grammar, the representation of phraseological units in constituency and dependency theories, phraseology and its interaction with semantics; Cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches: e.g. cognitive models of phraseological unit comprehension and production; on-line measures of phraseological unit processing (e.g. eye tracking, event-related potentials, self-paced reading); phraseology and language disorders; phraseology and text readability; The above list is indicative and not exhaustive. Any submission presenting a study related to the alternative terms of phraseological units, multiword expressions, multiword units, formulaic language or polylexical expressions, will be considered. Deadline for abstracts: 20 May 2022 For more information, click here

It is a pleasure to invite you to this year’s hybrid AUSIT National Conference to be held in Brisbane on 25-26 November 2022. The conference will take place at the beautiful campus of the University of Queensland, as well as online. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Rebuild and Belong: Evolution, Transformation and Growth’. It aims to offer participants a forum to discuss practical and theoretical issues relating to the T&I profession across a variety of different areas, focusing on rebuilding and re-connecting after two long years of dealing with the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Organising Committee (OC) is calling for the submission of abstracts for papers from a wide variety of interdisciplinary theoretical and practical perspectives. Submissions are organised into the following sub-themes: Cultivating connections with colleagues – the power of comradery, and team building; Self-growth – issues affecting practitioners and their businesses (mental health, adapting, professional skills, ethics and values, new mindset and new focus); Joining forces with other professions – new opportunities, relationships between T&I practitioners and professional end-users; Engaging with the community – current issues affecting community translation and interpreting; Innovation in the world – the T&I industry in the post-pandemic world, accessibility, new technologies and new advances. Deadline for abstracts: 24 June 2022 For more information, click here

JRHE, the Journal of Research in Higher Education published by Babeș-Bolyai University, the QUALITAS Centre, invites submissions for the forthcoming special issue on the research, pedagogy and practice of translation and interpretation, due out in September 2022. JRHE is a peer-reviewed, open access journal http://jrehe.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/, that seeks to address and factor in the major challenges educators, researchers, trainers and trainers of trainers in the field are faced with in these accelerated global times. As well as the changing professional communication patterns and policies manifesting themselves at this juncture in pandemic times, the volume sets out to engage the transformative forces impacting these academic subjects and the global language industry in the age of digital literacies and remote teaching. Fostering transdisciplinarity and multilingualism at the highest professional level in the language industry par excellence, the Department of Applied Modern Languages at BBU – a pioneering department in the country, marking its 30th anniversary in Higher Education in Romania– commissions state-of-the art contributions that cover the terrain of translation and interpretation studies. Submission topics may include, but are not limited to: Advanced technology applications in the pedagogies of CI and TS; Multimodality in T & I (audiovisuality, video-gaming, subtitling et al); Remote interpreting, I&T teaching and re-speaking; The cultural and ‘geo’ turn in translation studies; Posthumanities and translation and interpretation practice; Translation and interpretation and their territorial politics/policies; Deadline for abstracts: 30 June For more information, click here

Several relatively new forms of translation have emerged following the advent of the participatory Web 2.0. These include solicited forms of translation such as translation crowdsourcing used by for-profit companies like Facebook or Twitter. There are also other forms of translation like machine translation or self-translation occurring on social media platforms, especially on newer representatives like Instagram or TikTok (Desjardins 2019). Translation crowdsourcing is also employed by non-profit organizations like TED or Kiva. While these companies or organizations recruit voluntary and unpaid translators, there are also several translation platforms such as Gengo or Unbabel which employ paid translation crowdsourcing at below market rates (Jiménez-Crespo 2021). Furthermore, these relatively new forms of translation also include a wide range of unsolicited and self-managed types of translation such as interlingual knowledge-sharing through Wikipedia (Jones 2017, 2019; McDonough Dolmaya 2015, 2017) or Yeeyan (Yang 2020) as well as the various types of online fan translations such as fansubbing, fandubbing, scanlations or translation hacking (Fabbretti 2019; Lee 2009; Orrego-Carmona 2019; Muñoz Sánchez 2007, 2009). Even though these more recent phenomena and the communities involved in the translation process have caught the attention of Translation Studies scholars and have been studied from multiple perspectives, two lacunae have been identified by Zwischenberger (2021). Firstly, there is no consensus as to what constitutes the most appropriate top-level concept for these translation phenomena. Several candidates are currently being used concomitantly, including online collaborative translation, voluntary translation, user-generated translation (UGT), and social online translation, to name but a few. Secondly, research into the ethical implications of these online translation practices is lacking in depth and number. Ethical issues are only rarely addressed directly in the relevant literature and if so they are addressed only in passing. The special issue will tackle these two lacunae, with the groundwork having already been laid by our one-day symposium Translation on and over the Web: Disentangling its conceptual uncertainties and ethical questions, held in November 2021. Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2022 For more information, click here

Authors are expected to submit papers discussing the use of terminology withpossible connotative or ideological implications, intentional or otherwise, in variousdomains and in different communicative situations (intra‐ and interspecialistcommunication, knowledge dissemination for didactic/pedagogical purposes,popularization, etc.). Authors are invited to discuss one or more of the followingtopics:• the use of terminology with connotative or ideological implications orintentions in different communicative situations• the role of non‐experts (e.g., journalists) in fostering connotative andideological uses of terms resulting in terminology taking on connotative andideological undertones• the role of collaborative work (e.g., editorial teams) in the development ofconnotative and ideological terminology• the role of metaphors in the creation of connotative and ideologicalterminology• the consequences of using connotative and ideological terminology in differentcommunicative situations• the challenges posed by connotative and ideological terminology toterminology representation and management • terminology and political correctness in e.g., gender issues, woke culture, etc. • the role of translation in assigning ideological significance to terminologicalunits   For more information, click here Deadline for abstracts: 30 September 2022

Over the past 500 years, English has gone from a marginal language hardly spoken by anyone outside of England to a global lingua franca with speakers, native and non-native, all over the world. This has created situations of multilingualism both within countries where English is the main language and elsewhere, as many people who speak English on a regular basis are not native speakers, and the language itself has come into contact with other languages in the course of processes of colonisation, immigration, and globalisation. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these processes have broadened the contact zone of English, redefined its relations with the classical languages of humanist communication as well as with modern European languages (some of which have developed varieties outside Europe), and ultimately led to a questioning of the majority/minority-language binary. Literature and the verbal arts, be it to give a realistic description of the world or to experiment with language and form, have reflected, registered and contributed to such plurilingual practices.  To give only a few examples, early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Dryden included words or pieces of dialogue in fashionable foreign languages (mostly Italian and French) in their plays, as did Sterne in Tristram Shandy with long passages in French and in Latin; George Eliot’s choice of headings for the chapters in Middlemarch testifies to her plurilingual reading skills; the translation practices of émigré writers such as Nabokov or Beckett rely on their plurilingual experiences, as do Nancy Huston’s choices of self-translation between English and French. Authors from multilingual backgrounds writing in English such as (to name but a few) Derek Walcott, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Salman Rushdie resort to forms of language mixing and switching. Multilingualism takes on new inflections for contemporary British poets such as Steve Ely, whose concept of xenoglossia incorporates foreign words, Old English and dialecticisms. Evolutions in the status of English as a communication language in everyday lives and in artistic productions go hand in hand with evolutions in translation techniques and strategies, with the development of translation into English as a necessary means of worldwide communication as well as the acknowledgment of varied linguistic and cultural skills in target audiences. This is particularly striking in translations (dubbing or subtitling) of contemporary films and TV series which foreground multilingual (and multicultural) environments, such as Jane the Virgin, Unorthodox, Generations, and Derry Girls. Some film genres or series depict plurilingual characters, for example the protagonists in many Bollywood films, or Italian-American gangsters in The Godfather movies or Latino-American gangsters in Breaking Bad;  one could also think of westerns which stage multilingual encounters with Spanish-, French-speaking, or Native American characters.  For contemporary artists such as Caroline Bergvall, whose installation and collected poems Meddle English bring together English, French and Middle English, multilingualism fuels a reflection on multimodality. Theatre (The Forbidden Zone by Katie Mitchell, Tous des Oiseaux by Wajdi Mouawad) also uses multilingualism as a way to experiment with contemporary modes of representation on stage. More generally, traditional social constructs applied to analyse language use and cultural productions in translating, such as the “foreign/native” or the “source/target” opposition, are in need of redefinition. Likewise, the concept of lexical borrowing needs to be reexamined if English is considered a multilingual language from the start, with its elaboration relying on words and structures taken from Saxon, but also Latin and Romance languages – as the lexicographers (and the translators) from the Renaissance already knew. This two-part conference welcomes both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the interplay between multilingualism and translation involving English as source or target language and at least one other language in works of literature, the performing arts and audio-visual productions, from the sixteenth century to the present. Multilingualism will be taken in the broad meaning of the co-presence of several languages within the same work, thus including neighbouring concepts such as heterolingualism, and such phenomena as code-switching and multi-ethnolects. Papers that combine methodologies from linguistics, literary/film studies and translation studies will be particularly appreciated. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the study of: Strategies of translation that deal with multilingual sources, or that turn monolingual sources into multilingual translated works Editions of texts with their translation(s) Cases in which the target language also features in the source Comparisons of translation strategies in various target languages for English sources The rendering of phonetic specificities in both text and performance The translation of metadiscursive comments/elements in multilingual contexts The specific issues raised by dubbing and subtitling/surtitling Multilingualism and forms of expanded / contrapuntal / prismatic translation The technologies developed/adapted to facilitate the translation of multilingual texts The first part will take place at Université Paris Nanterre (30-31 March 2023), and will focus more specifically on literary works in print (and the issues related to translating and publishing multilingual texts) from the sixteenth century to the present. Keynote speaker: Dirk Delabastita (Université de Namur). The second part will take place at Université de Lille (February/March 2024), and will focus more specifically on the performing arts, films and TV series (and the challenges set to translators by aural effects dependent on multilingualism). Keynote speaker: Charlotte Bosseaux (The University of Edinburgh). For more information, click here Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS TrAdE III: Adapting Alterity in Anglophone Scenarios                                    Tor Vergata University of Rome, 25-26 November 2022 Diversity and inclusion have not only gained key importance in our times, but they have also been at the core of a wide variety of academic subjects and heterogeneous research methodologies, with particular reference to linguistics, literature, and culture. The third edition of the annual conference organized by the Research Group TrAdE (Translation and Adaptation from/into English) seeks to explore how translation and adaptation deal with diversity and inclusion. The very first conference organized by TrAdE was focused on words, following along their journey from one linguo-cultural system to another, words as channels connecting different languages and cultures; words as bridges, means for connection and contact. Which inevitably produces contamination and contagion, as TrAdE’s second conference attempted to analyze, hosting contributions by scholars from every corner of the globe. For its third conference, the Research Group is going to delve into translation and adaptation of alterity/otherness in Anglophone texts and contexts. Alterity, Otherness, Diversity: words implying distinction, separation, distance, borders, frontiers designed to separate. The transdisciplinary Conference shall be focused on (but not limited to) the following topics: Discrimination based on Religious Prejudice and Gender, Civil Rights in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives and Different Geo-Political Contexts; Diversity/Inclusion in Education and (Social) Media; Diversity/Inclusion in Art(s), Music, Movies and TV Series; Diversity/Inclusion in Language, Literature, Linguistics and Translation; Diversity/Inclusion of Style(s) and Genre(s); Identity and Alterity; Hegemonic vs Lesser Spoken Languages; Hate speech. Memories and Trauma. Confirmed keynote speakers: Silvia Antosa, Kore University of Enna Elisabetta Marino, Tor Vergata University of Rome Pablo Romero-Fresco, Roehampton University Panels/Abstracts Submission Proposals for individual one-twenty-minutes presentations (no longer than 200 words) should include a session title, the name and contact information of the speaker, his/her affiliation and a 50-word bionote. Panelists’ one-hour sessions should include a session title, the name, the affiliation and contact information of the chair, abstracts no longer than 200 words from each presenter, together with their name, affiliation and a 50-word bionote. Please send panels and/or individual proposals and bio sketches to: segreteria.trade@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals: 30th June 2022 Notification of acceptance: by 20th July 2022 Scientific Committee Daniela Guardamagna Elisabetta Marino Rossana Sebellin Giulia Magazzù Valentina Rossi Angela Sileo Organizing Committee Giulia Magazzù Valentina Rossi Angela Sileo For more information, please visit: https://gruppotrade-2019.uniroma2.it/

  Mean Machines? Technological (R)evolution and Human Labour in the Translation and Interpreting Industry The translation sector has become a prototypical case for the revolutionary force of digitalisation. The outsourcing of translation processes from humans to machines, combined with easy and free access to translation services via digital tools, is radically changing the entire field of transcultural communication. This special issue focuses on technology-induced transformations that can be observed on a variety of levels in the translation and interpreting landscape. On an industry level, the value ascribed to professional human translation is in decline, as machine translation (MT) is becoming increasingly efficient (Carmo 2020). This leads to economic reverberations for human translators who struggle to negotiate adequate rates for their assignments (Vieira 2020). It is evident that the machinisation of translation results in growing economic pressure for professional human translators. The digital transformation in the field of translation also triggers a debate on the level of theory and ethics. This includes a discussion on the status and purpose of translation in an increasingly globalised and digitalised world (Cronin 2012). MT can be described as a means of low-threshold access to translation, in a sense liberalising translation for broad segments of the population (cf. O’Thomas 2017: 285). At the same time, the large-scale deployment of MT through multinational corporations offers ample potential for a critique of technocapitalist practices (cf. Baumgarten/Cornellà-Detrell 2018) and raises questions of ownership and participation in technology development (Bijker/ Hughes/Pinch 2012). This special issue invites contributions that focus on the effects of the machinisation and digitalisation of translation and interpreting on the levels of labour, industry, theory and ethics. The special issue will discuss how our views on translation as a product, a process, a business sector and as a social practice are subject to steady and gradual transformations, with transcultural communication progressively sliding into the realm of machines. We particularly welcome contributions with a critical, interdisciplinary and daring theoretical outlook. Contributions may be submitted from a wide array of investigative lines, not limited to the ones mentioned above, and may be inspired by one or more of the following questions: How are the working conditions and job profiles of professional translators transformed in the face of digitalisation? How does the value of translation change as it increasingly becomes a post-human task? Against what background can the value of translation be measured? What is the role of Translation Studies in the investigation of translation technology, considering the discipline’s history and genetics? How can theories and heuristics from Science and Technology Studies, such as Social Construction of Technology (Bijker/Hughes/Pinch 2012), contribute to a more holistic view of translation technology and, especially, machine translation? In what way can the hegemony of technology corporations in the development and deployment of MT systems be described as a technocapitalist practice? Do we need to incorporate a critical theory of technology (cf. Feenberg 2002) in translation studies as a basis for a comprehensive investigative approach to translation technology? How can translation technology be assessed against the background of ecology and climate change, considering its use of resources through energy-intensive data centres (cf. Cronin 2019)? To contribute to this special issue, please submit a short paper proposal (500 words, excluding references) to both guest editors:   Michael Tieber, michael.tieber@uni-graz.at Stefan Baumgarten, stefan.baumgarten@uni-graz.at                          Publication schedule Deadline for paper proposals 15 April 2022 Notification on paper proposals 30 April 2022 Submission of full papers 31 October 2022 Notification on peer review outcome 31 March 2023 Revised versions 30 June 2023 Final manuscripts 30 September 2023 Tentative publication date Winter 2023   References Baumgarten, Stefan/Cornellà-Detrell, Jordi (2018) “Translation and the economies of power”, in: Baumgarten, Stefan/Cornellà-Detrell (eds.) Translation and the global spaces of power. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 11-26.   Bijker, Wiebe E./Hughes, Thomas P./Pinch, Trevor J. (eds.) (2012/1987) The social construction of  technological systems. New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.   Carmo, Felix do (2020) “‘Time is money’ and the value of translation”, in: Translation Spaces 9 (1), 35-57.   Cronin, Michael (2012) Translation in the digital age. London/New York: Routledge (New perspectives in translation studies).   Cronin, Michael (2019) “Translation, technology and climate change”, in: O’Hagan, Minako (ed.) The  Routledge handbook of translation and technology. London/New York: Routledge, 516-530.   Feenberg, Andrew (2002) Transforming technology: a critical theory revisited. Oxford: OUP.   O’Thomas, Mark (2017) “Humanum ex machina. Translation in the post-global, posthuman world”, in: Target 29 (2), 284-300.   Vieira, Lucas N. (2020) “Automation anxiety and translators”, in: Translation Studies 13 (1), 1-21.

The past decade has seen a substantial rise in research publications focused more and more on the issue of translation tasks and projects having to tackle with texts that are not limited to a single language, dialect, or sociolect (Beseghi 2017, Ranzato and Zanotti 2018, Pérez and de Higes 2019, Rebane and Junkerjürgen 2019, to mention but a few). In other words, they display, and play with, the inclusion of words or phrases that do not belong to the standard language norm of the main language the text is composed in. The decade(s) before that required that such studies be introduced by a justification of the importance or relevance of language variation within texts (e.g., Sternberg 1981, Delabastita and Grutman 2005, Bleichenbacher 2008, Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011). This is no longer necessary nor is it accurate to claim that there is a woeful lack of studies on this topic. So, the question now is how far have we come exactly in our progress towards including this kind of sensitivity in the mainstream of translation studies, both theoretically and in the applied domain of professional practice and academic training? How is (yet another) dichotomy—of foreign vs. non-foreign—called into question by multilingual phenomena, such as creoles and code-switching, which are not necessarily based on the same factors as national borders, especially if we take into account multilingual communities and co-official languages within a given country?  This Special Issue aims to address this question by accepting submissions that deal with it from different angles such as the ones suggested here but not limited to them: Are translators proficient in all the languages of a multilingual fictional text (e.g., a novel or television series), and do they need to be? How is multilingualism in fiction an element of an author’s style and how is multilingualism dealt with accordingly? What strategies are used by translators in rendering scripted multilingualism and how they are affected by the habitual strategies involved in translation practices? How have stereotypes (of character portrayal, conversational patterns or topics, or situations or events) developed and changed regarding the strategic use of foreign languages, dialects and non-native use of languages? What are the practices and trends of using and rendering invented languages (e.g., as spoken by aliens from other planets or fantasy worlds)? Are translations becoming more multilingual or linguistically diverse and, if so, by what means? What genres and text-types are more affected by multilingualism, more problematic or innovative in translation? In what aspects can / must we revise traditional theoretical approaches in the light of discoveries made in the area of multilingual translation? What about less traditional approaches, such as taking LGBTiQ+ studies/factors into account, or racial discourse, etc.? To what extent is lingua franca a factor, and directionality, as in the distinction between from English vs. into English, for instance, or between languages that are not widespread on a global level? Are there significant differences depending on whether the texts are written or audiovisual, i.e., mode and multimodality? What are the relations between translation, multilingualism, pseudotranslations, creoles, code-switching, slang, non-native speech and other manifestations of sociolinguistic variation? What historical periods can be meaningfully sketched both in the use of multilingualism in film, television, and video on demand, and the way they were and have been translated? What are the key characteristics of each period and the key factors of change from one period to another? How have the researchers’ interests in the field of translation studies been sparked, what is the focus of their research and how has it evolved? What other aspects of translation has multilingualism been related to? How is multilingualism tackled in machine translation, artificial intelligence, templates for translators, and post-editing practices? Deadline for submission of abstracts: 12 October 2022 For more information, click here 

The impact of AI on literary translation: assessing changes in translation theory, practice and creativity In early 2020, we discussed the possibility of organizing a TRACT seminar series on machine translation (MT) of literary texts. Since then, this topic has been the subject of an ever-increasing number of conferences, articles and monographs. It is probably the spectacular “progress” of MT tools now available to the general public — in particular DeepL and Google Translate, taking advantage of recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) — that has made it inevitable for the literary translation community to take this phenomenon into account.             Indeed, these tools, especially because of their ability to process an impressive quantity of texts almost instantaneously, reinforce the idea that translation, i.e. going from one language to another, is quite a straightforward operation, the manifestation of a one-to-one relationship between two languages. This reflects a simplistic conception of language, seen as a code, which translators would simply have to decode and then re-encode, following transformation rules or algorithms.             And this is precisely how the first translation machines were imagined and designed, before being supplanted by statistical translation, and then by so-called “neural” machine translation. However, the blatant failure of the first attempts at machine translation led to the total and brutal suppression of the budget allocated to this research in 1966 in the United States following the conclusions of the ALPAC report. On the other hand, the still perceptible imperfections of MT, based only on the statistical processing of huge parallel corpora, never seemed likely to call into question the role of human translators (otherwise called “bio-translators”). Until recently, only specialized or pragmatic translators often resorted to computer-assisted translation or CAT. However, with the rapid advent of CAT, even literary translators fear that their autonomy, their authorial status, their agency might be threatened. The creative dimension of their work, which translators have been claiming for so many years, is at risk of being forgotten and replaced by the ancillary activity of post-editing. Man at the service of the machine, so to speak.             It is easy to see what advantages unscrupulous publishers could gain from this new situation. This is particularly true for so-called “genre literature” (fantasy, romance, sci-fi, etc.) that tends to follow repetitive and set patterns. The neural machine translation of fantasy or romance books, for example, would save a lot of time and therefore money, which would certainly change the practices of the publishing world.             Faced with this situation, it seems that literary translation practitioners and theorists can no longer remain on the sidelines. “L’observatoire de la traduction automatique” [The Machine Translation Study Centre] set up in 2019 by ATLAS, the Association for the Promotion of Literary Translation, is a concrete example of this in France. It is not a question of adopting a defensive position, but of taking full account of the paradigm shift in translation that the emergence of NMT implies. In any case, it will not disappear and is even likely, according to some A.I. specialists, to make progress that could, in the long run, supplant bio-translators.             That is why, beyond the fears aroused by NMT among translation professionals, and beyond the criticism of the quality of the translations it produces, we wish to question the shifts that NMT induces in our ways of considering translation. In other words, what NMT does to the concept of translation and, consequently, to translation theory — how our experience of translation, modified by the presence of the machine, necessarily affects the way we think about translation. Is the machine capable of capturing the singularity of an author's style, of what the author does with and to language? Can NMT find a strategy capable of restoring the complexity of the translation process, in one way or another? This leads us to a renewed questioning of what it means to “understand” a text, and more generally to “read” a text, especially if we consider with G. Steiner that “to understand is to translate”. Can we say that the machine reads the text in order to translate it the way the bio-translator does? Translating implies the implementation of an extremely refined form of thought. And this brings us back to the question posed by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), back in 1950: "Can machines think?”            How does the human translator understand the source text? Is reading the text to be translated different from reading for pleasure? How does the translator arrive at the target text, through hesitations, backtracking, dictionary consultations, etc.? Can research on the cognitive processes at work in human translators shed useful light on these questions? Our seminar proposes to investigate the topic in three directions (which necessarily intersect at certain points): We would like to introduce literary translators, Translation Studies specialists, researchers, students to the new tools coming from AI, CAT, NMT, enlightening them on how they work, the role of computational linguistics, cognitive science, neurosciences, their history, the perspectives of progress, their limits etc. How does NMT measure up to literary texts; what challenges does literature — especially poetry — with its equivocation, ambiguities, enigmatic meanings, points of untranslatability pose to NMT? Conversely, what part can NMT, CAT tools, play in the renewal of literary creativity? Does NMT effect a paradigm shift for translation? To what extent do omnipresent machines allow us to gain awareness of the fact that certain processes that used to be performed by expert translations only have now become automatic? What is the place of bio-translators? Do they become liberated or alienated by the machine (which cannot function without human-produced data)? In what way can the translators' lived experience of these changes help to map out a new paradigm, which includes but also exceeds the pragmatic dimension of this work? As part of the above, the following questions might be addressed: Could the new MT tools really replace human translators in the long run? Consequences of and new directions in teaching translation at universities in the age of NLP Can corpus translatology or CAT improve the quality of literary translations or retranslations? To what extent are the practices of pragmatic translators transferable to literary translators? Does the machine make the bio-translator an augmented or a diminished translator? What role for the machine, what role for the human? How do NNT and CAT change the translator's relationship to the literary text, his or her reading of the text, and thus his or her engagement with the text? Human/machine interaction in literary translation: is collaboration possible, desirable, or harmful? Aren't literary translators in danger of being strongly encouraged by publishers to become specialized editors (development of post-editing)? Won't the machine reduce them to an ancillary function that they have been trying to free themselves from for decades? Can't the machine become the ally of literary creativity, through the randomness it introduces into the translation, or through the formal constraints that can be instilled in it (rhymes and feet in the translation of poetry, for example)? Isn't genre literature, which often responds to fairly formatted forms of writing (fantasy, romance, etc.) an ideal target for the development of NMT in the literary field? What happens to the “translation project" — dear to Antoine Berman — if we entrust the text to a machine? Does corpus stylistics allow us better to study and compare the translation strategies implemented by human translators? Is it relevant for comparing machine translation and bio-translation? Does readers’ reception of literary texts differ depending on the modalities of their translation? Deadline for abstracts: 6 June 2022 For more information, click here