The future
However , we cannot afford to be cynical about the role of machines in translation. We have to accept the fact that translation and translators are located in the technologically advanced world today, and can afford to ignore technology only at their peril. Cronin is of the view that translators should ideally be poised between the sciences and the humanities, as practitioners of a ‘third culture’ (112). They interact with, and negotiate several disciplines that occupy an ‘in-between’ space, an area with fuzzy boundaries. They travel constantly between languages and cultures, but are also bound by the disciplinary peculiarities. Cronin’s term for these “translation agents of the new millennium” is “translational cyborgs who can no longer be conceived of independently of the technologies with which they interact” (112). They do not constantly draw upon material from scientific or technical matter, but their identity is modified by the technological developments in translation methods. They are termed cyborgs because they are informed by technology as well. However, they refuse to be taken over completely by machines.
There were many people who predicted that once the concept of MT gained ground, we can expect the slow demise of human agency in translation. This has not happened; in fact, statistics reveal that there are more human translators than ever before. Cronin observes that the problem with such predictions is that it prefers substitutive thinking over relational thinking: “That is to say, the notion of the machine fully replacing the translator or becoming a wholly adequate substitute for the translator is considerably less plausible than the emergence of translational cyborgs where the levels of interaction between humans and machines are deeper and more extensive, with the strengths of each relating to the other in an optimal and mutually complementary fashion” (116). This is a much more positive outlook which conceptualizes a future which does not deny or downplay technological development and where machines and humans cooperate to produce faster (and perhaps better?) translations.
Assignments
- What are the various ways in which machines or computers can aid the activity of translation?
- What does the future hold for machine translation?
References
Cronin, Michael. Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2004.
Freigang, Karl-Heinz. “Machine-aided Translation”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker. 1998. London: Routledge, 2001: 134-136.
Somers, Harold L. “Machine Translation”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker. 1998. London: Routledge, 2001: 140 – 143.
O’Hanagan, Minako. “Computer-aided Translation”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Eds. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanah. 1998. London: Routledge, 2009: 48 – 51.
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