Translation, Interpreting and Technological Change

The observation, made over thirty years ago, that ‘our existence is technologically textured’ (Ihde 1990: 2) is perhaps all the more salient today; technology is imbricated in every aspect of our private, social, cultural and professional lives, shaping how we act in and interact with the various spaces we inhabit. The seemingly inexorable reach of technology, especially with regard to language and communication, is then reason enough for us to pause and take stock of how recent technological changes have been impacting the discipline of translation and interpreting studies across research, practice and training. Indeed, things are moving apace: the ‘technological turn’, posited by Michael Cronin in 2010, has since been fully realized, to the extent that ‘technology is now an integral part of the discipline of TS . . . and will continue to be so for years to come’ (Jiménez-Crespo 2020: 332). Accordingly, the disciplinary significance and embeddedness of technology sets the backdrop for this book and its exploration of how and to what effect the processes, the products, as well as our conceptual and applied understanding of translation and interpreting, are all being shaped by innovations in software, artificial intelligence and the increasing distribution and portability of digital services. CIUTI The initial momentum for this book stemmed from the very successful (Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes) conference on ‘Translation and interpreting in an era of demographic and technological change’, hosted by the Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies in Scotland (CTISS) at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in May 2018. In turn, the richness and diversity of perspectives that characterized the event now inform the present chapters, with international contributions from across the world that bring to light insights from researchers, trainers and practitioners who span different career stages and language pairings, and who hold diverse stakeholder positions with regard to technology. Together, these contributions reflect prominent trends in the field today, as approached from the standpoints of research, practice and training, and with a focus on shifting human-machine interactions (Part I), shifting methods and models (Part II) and shifting pedagogies (Part III). At the centre of each chapter is the drive to explore the implications that technological developments are having and will continue to have on translation and interpreting activities. Contributions to this volume were written before the start of the pandemic and it has not been possible to cover related developments here. Undoubtedly, the sudden adaptations and changes which came about in the wake of an epidemic which enforced remoteness on all aspects of social life will provide fertile ground for future research. Indeed, the volume endeavours to play its part in advancing the growing body of research on translation technologies and its attendant insights into areas as diverse as literary translation, risk assessment, the developments from statistical machine translation (SMT) to neural machine translation (NMT) and training. The content of the volume is weighted towards translation technology. This is a reflection of current patterns of usage and the research ecology of the discipline. Yet the changing technological basis of social practices might be well illustrated by the fact that technology was instrumental in the inception of the simultaneous mode (SI) of interpreting for a wider audience in the 1920s. A more recent ‘technological turn’ has been unfolding with advances in digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the increasing mobility of its usage due to distributed devices. In the field of translation technologies, the research foci today remain on computer-assisted translation (CAT), notably on the main CAT tool of translation memory systems, and machine translation (MT), in particular due to the recent significant advance to neural technology, while a growing body of research emerges on human-machine interaction.