Translation Futures

Translators and interpreters in the digital age face manifold opportunities and challenges that are only compounded as Artificial Intelligence in the form of Large Language Models moves into the public sphere. This seminar explores how new forms of technology and media shape the work of translation and prompt new forms of reading and engaging with archives or bringing the past into the present and future. We consider ethical and philosophical implications of emerging translation technologies. How do new translation technologies and literary ecosystems disrupt notions of authorship, textuality, and agency? What translation interventions are warranted to safeguard and lend visibility to minority languages and marginalized subjects? What are the particular perils and opportunities for translators in an era of globalization and our shared susceptibility to crises such as pandemics, the manipulation of information, and a changing climate? We ask what translators and translation theorists might offer a world coming to terms with new problems of language, communication, truth, and representation. 
 
This seminar, organized by the ICLA Translation Studies Research Committee, invites abstracts interrogating digital translation encounters from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives—literary, historical, sociolinguistic, ethical—and considers themes including but not limited to the following:  
 

Translation and AI  
Translation and the Digital Archive
Translation and the Nonhuman  
Translation and Globalization  
Translation and Crisis  
Translation Equity and Agency  
Translation Justice in the Digital Era  
Collaborative Translation
Translation and Affect  
Translation and Intermediality