Mixing Human and Nonhuman Translation: Neurodiversity and the Sociology of Inclusion in Contrapuntal Translation Practice

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20 octobre 2022

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Samuel Trainor, « Mixing Human and Nonhuman Translation: Neurodiversity and the Sociology of Inclusion in Contrapuntal Translation Practice », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10670/1.8dexae


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In Bruno Latour's essay "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer” (1988), he proposes the term “transcription” to refer to the “translation of any script from one repertoire to a more durable one”. He gives the example of the replacement of a police officer with a set of traffic lights.This paper calls into question this paradigm of social replacement as it relates to NMT. Latour’s metaphor derives from an instrumental misrepresentation of translation. It is hardly surprising that current debates surrounding machine translation are haunted by its spectre. The majority of NMT platforms are designed to work autonomously, even when they incorporate responsive learning. They are also invariably ‘domesticating’. Their designers want them to pass a Turing Test: producing simulacra of human translations capable of convincing a reader they were written by an accomplished native speaker. This is classic translatorial ‘invisibility’. Anyone with a grounding in translation theory can unpick the basic premise. However, this paper suggests that translation professionals feeling threatened by NMT should avoid abstruse theoretical objections, or appeals to human creativity, and promote the ethical case for a more inclusive, ‘neurodiverse’ translation practice.What separates ‘inclusion’ from ‘accessibility’ in social policy is the involvement of a variety of target users at an early stage of conception. The growing predominance of artificial neural networks in our societies is redefining the concept of neurodiversity, potentially rendering all humans neurodivergent. So the argument for early-stage ‘biotranslation’ (not merely in post-editing) has become an ethical question of inclusion. A key contention is that NMT cannot be discussed in isolation from other technologies and their social and ecological impacts. Inclusive working methods are significantly boosted by technological platforms for collaboration. Meanwhile, similar technologies are making literary publishing increasingly multimodal and interactive. But all of this comes at a cost. If NMT could be moved away from current paradigms of replacement, made ecologically more sustainable and methodologically more open and plural – in particular if it could be integrated into technologies that enable interaction, working polyphonically in collaboration with biotranslators – then it could become genuinely valuable in literary translation.

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