It's already translating; will it write tomorrow?

Today’s increasingly important and widely used machine translation is commonly viewed as doing—by using advanced digital technology, especially AI—what the human intuition expects of translation: to bridge linguistic and cultural differences so as to facilitate communication. It does that indeed, but so much faster than humans, that the dream of a global communicative paradise now seems to finally come true: all the linguistic barriers and cultural differences are bypassed; there is no longer need for a human intermediary to translate, no need for interpretation. Moreover, there are no longer temporal delays. Communication has become instantaneous. Consequently, there are no more mistranslations, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, no more facing off with the untranslatable. And finally, there is no more opacity or obscurity that goes with translation. But what if the ideal of total transparency becoming a reality, is, in fact, a dystopic nightmare – a picture of the world populated by monolingual monads who no longer experience any linguistic or cultural differences, in short, a cognitive desert. Would writing in such a world still make sense?

The class will discuss: labor theory of Large Language Models, the declining power of Global English, political economy of language, linguistic diversity, the extinction of languages, „critical“ and „low resource“ langauges etc. The class will also make practical use of AI in the learning process and analyse its results.

Readings:

Buden, Boris, Cultural Translation: Why it is important and where to start with it? http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0606/buden/en

Boris Buden/Stefan Nowotny: “Cultural translation: An introduction to the problem”, Translation Studies 2/2 July 2009, p.196-208.

David Gramling, (2019). Supralingualism and the translatability industry. Applied Linguistics, 41(1), 129–147. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz023

Lydia H Liu & Ranupama Rao, Introduction: The lifeworld of languages: Rethinking logos, oikos, and techné. In L. H. Liu & A. Rao (Eds.), Global language justice (pp. 1–33). Columbia University Press. (2024).

Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, Border as a method, or, The multiplication of labor. In Edu-factory Collective (Ed.), Toward a global autonomous university: Cognitive labor, the production of knowledge, and exodus from the education factory. Autonomedia. (2009).

Nicolas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. Walker & Company. . (2010).

Douglas Robinson, Critical Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge, (2017)

Lawrence Venuti, The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge (1995).

A collection of more than 20 essays on “translation,” each in at least three languages:

“under translation”/06 2006

https://transversal.at/transversal/0606

“borders, nations, translations” /06 2008

https://transversal.at/transversal/0608

“talks on translation” / 09 2008

https://transversal.at/transversal/0908

Consists in the active participation and contribution (discursive, textual and performative).

The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and

• - submission of written assignments (word minimum of 1000 total)

 “Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”