Call for papers for the TRACT conference: "Literary translation and artificial intelligence: theory, practice, creation

Call for papers for the TRACT conference: “Literary translation and artificial intelligence: theory, practice, creation

6 mai 2022

TRACT (Centre de recherche en traduction et communication transculturelle), one of the five teams of the PRISMES-EA 4398 research unit at Sorbonne Nouvelle, is planning to organize the conference ” Literary Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Theory, Practice, Creation” on October 20 and 21. The theme of the conference will be machine translation, and more specifically the major changes that neural machine translation (NMT) will bring to the field of translation.

Artificial intelligence has led to a major technological evolution in the field of translation, with machine translation software becoming more and more powerful and offering near-instantaneous translation. Autonomous neural machine translation (ANN) systems, based on deep learning, are now capable of performing complex tasks and offer a more fluent and accurate translation, taking into account the context, than that provided by statistical translation.

Nevertheless, specific translation services rely on human translators to fine-tune the translated texts. By mastering the subtleties of the language, they can check for misunderstandings and make the necessary corrections. This post-editing work makes translators fear that their status will be called into question, as the creative dimension of their profession will be threatened by NAT.

TRACT’s call for contributions

The TRACT team has considered the implications that the use of NAT will bring to the concept of translation and has decided to organize a seminar on June 20 and 21, 2010, for which it is launching a call for papers. After having created an account on Sciences Conf, it will be possible to submit proposals for papers in French or English. These proposals must be sent before June 6, 2022 here (Please create an account on Sciences Conf beforehand).

Contributions must include :

a title;
a 300 word summary;
5 keywords;
a short bio-bibliography;

The response will be sent to the authors of the proposals on July 1st, 2022. A selection of contributions will be published in the 38th issue of the journal Palimpsestes.

Literary translation and artificial intelligence conference

The TRACT team has asked itself the following questions: How does our experience of translation, modified by the presence of the machine, necessarily influence our way of thinking about translation? Is the machine capable of capturing the singularity of an author’s style, of what he does with and to language? Can it find a strategy capable of restoring this complex transformation, 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, a fortiori 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 as the biotranslator does? Translating implies the implementation of an extremely refined form of thought. The question posed by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), back in 1950 was “Can machines think? How does the human translator understand the source text? Is the reading of the text to be translated different from the reading for pleasure? By what means, hesitations, backtracking, dictionary consultations, etc., does the translator arrive at the target text? Can the machine define its target text and adapt its translation strategies to it? Can research on the cognitive processes at work in human translators shed useful light on these questions?”

Three axes are considered (which necessarily overlap in some points):

Introduce literary translators, translators, teachers-researchers, and students to the new tools of AI, CAT, and NLP, and explain how they work, the role of computational linguistics, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences, their history, the prospects for progress, their limitations, etc.
How does NAT measure up to literary texts; what challenges does literature (especially poetry) pose to it with its equivocations, ambiguities, enigmatic meanings, and points of untranslatability that are often its signature? Conversely, what part can NAT, CAT, play in the renewal of literary creativity?
Does NAT effect a paradigm shift for translation? How does the omnipresence of the machine make us aware of the automation of certain processes that were once carried out by expert translators? What happens to the place of the biotranslator: is he or she liberated or alienated by the machine (which cannot function without using human data)? How do these changes experienced by translators allow us to draw a new paradigm, including but also exceeding the pragmatic dimension of this work?

Within this framework, the following questions could be addressed, among others

Could the new MT tools really replace human translators in the long run?
Teaching translation at universities in the age of NLP?
Can corpus translation and 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 biotranslator an augmented or a diminished translator? What role for the machine, what role for the human?
How do NAT and CAT change the translator’s relationship to the literary text, his reading of the text and thus his 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 an 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 NAT in the literary field?
Does the machine “hear” the author’s voice? Is it able to make a singular voice heard in translation?
What happens to the translation “project” dear to Antoine Berman if we entrust the text to a machine?
Does corpus stylistics allow us to better study and compare the translation strategies used by human translators? Is it relevant for comparing machine translation and biotranslation?
Do readers’ reception of literary texts differ according to the way they are translated?