Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 10 Vol.14 2024 October (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
The quality of state-of-the-art machine translation systems have prompted a number of scholars to tap into the readiness of such systems for “literary” translation. However, studies on literary machine translation have not overtly stated what they consider as literature and mistakenly assume that literary translation is a matter of transferring meaning and/or form from one language into another. By approaching literature as art and literary translation as an artistic work of re-creation, we counterpoint, in this article, the notion that literary machine translation can be seen as an indisputable evolution within translation technology. Ethical concerns may well be utilitarian in studies to date, but by advocating for a deontological approach, we consider that aesthetical value, cultural mediation (which includes the use of paratexts), and authorship of literary translation (should) rank higher in our ethical assessments of the feasibility and actual contributions of literary machine...
Edebiyatın Sanatlararası İlişkileri, 2022
This study aims to discuss the historical background of the dilemmatic relationship between the art of translation and literature in the light of the theoretical debates regarding the marginalized position of translators and translations from the ancient ages to the modern and post-human era. The diachronic changes occurring in the definition of translation constitute the main focus of the present study, which comprises of three parts. In the first part, a theoretical framework is drawn with reference to the perception of translation as an imitation of the source text in the ancient ages and as an educational practice of intercultural exchange in the Renaissance and Romantic era. In the second part, philosophical, socio-cultural, and historical foundations of the conceptualization of translation as a subjective act of recreation are assessed within the context of deconstructivism and cultural turn prevailing in translation studies after the second half of the 20th century. In the third part, possible effects of the machine translation technologies on the performability of literary translation in the post-human era are problematized in consideration of recent changes that these technological tools led to in the publishing and translation industries. Consequently, it has been established that the relationship between the art of translation and literature has constantly been subject to social, cultural, political, economic, and technological changes throughout the history, and that this has a great potential to create new research questions and tendencies among translation scholars in the future.
Google Translate Gets Voltaire: Literary Translation and the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2019
In the fall of 2016, users of Google Translate working from French to English and English to French saw a marked improvement in the quality of the translated texts. Google Translate was beginning to develop from a purely phrasebased statistical machine translation system into a system that uses deep learning and artificial neural networks that can adapt and learn in reaction to all they encounter. The Google Translate development team has been working on expanding and strengthening the system's capability of pragmatic analysis. This capability entails extracting useful information from a text so that its meaning can be accurately inferred in an attempt to overcome the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in language, which have remained the greatest hurdles to effective machine translation. This article explores the potential of Google Translate to provide increasingly competent translations of literary texts. Using passages from the works of Voltaire translated by Google Translate into English, this article explores both the successes and the ongoing problems faced by new generations of Google Translate, and of machine translation systems in general, as their developers seek to overcome the hurdles of identifying and rendering style, nuance, and ambiguity in language.
Routledge Handbook of Translation History, 2020
This chapter outlines the theoretical and practical issues involved in compiling and analyzing the translation histories of literary classics from a socio-historical perspective. Starting from an overview of the theoretical framework (distant reading and sociological theory), I then move on to the practicalities of how and where to locate translations, both online and in print. Subsequently, I focus on one case study, namely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and analyzse its translation history. I give concrete data about the worldwide reception of this work – when and in which languages it was translated (and where it wasn’t was not translated) –- and then address specifically its translations into English. I show how often it was translated into specific forms – such as terza rima, blank verse, and free verse – and I additionally present examples of when it was censured in translation (in both Arabic and English). I address three other aspects of translation history as well: the nationalities of translators (focusing especially on the difference between UK and USA translators),; the age of translators;, and the gender of translators. I demonstrate that the vast majority of English translators of Dante’s Divine Comedy are male translators, even to the present day.
MT at the Test Bench: The Case of Literary Classics' Translation
In the last decades, the field of Machine Translation got an increasingly wide attention, especially due to the very high request for technical texts' translations. My aim in this paper is to bring this topic further by analyzing the alleged usefulness of MT systems in literary translation, which I claim to be a different thing altogether from translation in general. For this purpose I shall deal with the case of literary classics, trying to show how the human contribution is in this regard indispensable, and thereby claiming that strict MT (that is, fully automatic MT) should not be treated as translation.
Literary Translation Human VS Machine: An Essay About Online Translation
The ways to translate are manifold since textual genres undergoing translations are diverse. In this essay, our goal is to give special attention to the literary genre and to the online translation tool Google Translate (GT), widely used either by nonprofessionals or by scholars, in order to show evidence of the indispensability of human wit in a good translation. Our study is based on a literary review of prominent authors, with emphasis on translation categories. Also highlighting the issue of polysemous literary translation, we aim to shed light on the translator's craft and the fallible nature of online translation. To better illustrate these principles, the methodology consisted on performing a comparative analysis involving the original text Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe in English to its online translation given by GT and to a translation into Brazilian Portuguese performed by a human. We proceeded to identifying and analyzing the degrees of textual equivalence according to the following categories: volume, levels and order. The results have attested the unsuitability in a translation done by a computer connected to the World Wide Web.