Keynotes

Ana Guerberof Arenas

 Ana Guerberof Arenas is an associate professor in Translation Studies at University of Groningen. From 2020-22, she was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow working on the CREAMT project that looked at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. More recently she has been awarded a ERC Consolidator grant by the European Research Council to work on the five-year project INCREC (2023-2028) that explores the translation creative process in its intersect with technology in literary and AVT translation. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training, ethical considerations in MT, AI and the industry, creativity and reception studies. She has more than 23 years’ experience in the translation industry.

The INCREC project: creativity and technology in translation

In this talk, I will give an overview of how creativity is conceptualised in the social sciences, mainly psychology and sociology, including different frameworks that facilitate analysing creativity. I will also touch upon how the technological field has presented and has studied creativity, and how translation in combination with technology can be explored. 

With this aim in mind, I will also present results from the CREAMT project (2020-2022) that explored creativity in literary texts in different translation modalities: translation by professional literary translators, machine translation using a customized neural engine, and post-edition. Further it looked at the impact on readers by looking at narrative engagement, enjoyment and translation reception. 

Finally, I will describe the new ERC CoG INCREC  research project (2023-2028) that looks to uncover the creative process in professional literary and audiovisual translators in order to create specific frameworks, and how and when technology, e.g. machine translation, can be used to enhance rather than constrain creativity. But also if the intended audiences, readers and viewers, appreciate, not only cognitively but also emotionally, creative shifts in translated content and why this might be. 

Andrew Rothwell

Andrew Rothwell is Emeritus Professor of French and Translation Studies at Swansea University. He has research interests in contemporary French literature, especially the poet and art writer Bernard Noël, translation technologies, and translation theory. He has published numerous literary translations into English, including of poetry by Noël and two novels by Emile Zola (for Oxford World’s Classics), and is currently working on a new translation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière for the same publisher. Recent books include Translation Tools and Technologies (with Joss Moorkens, María Fernández Parra, Joanna Drugan and Frank Austermuehl) and Computer-Assisted Literary Translation (co-edited with Andy Way and Roy Youdale), both published in 2023 by Routledge.

CAT, TM, NMT, and AI: A Literary Translator’s Dream Team?

Since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been an explosion of interest in the remarkable text-production capabilities (including paraphrasing, summarizing and translation) of such generative AI tools. Whether they can be of assistance to the literary translator, and if so, how they can best be made to interoperate with existing CAT and MT environments, remains, however, a largely moot question.

This paper will describe my developing use of different technologies, over almost a decade, to produce English translations of classic novels in French by Emile Zola and Marcel Proust. Acknowledging the documented reticence of literary translators to adopt computerised tools, I will nevertheless argue for the practical benefits of using: –

The core of the paper will be a presentation of how these technologies are now being combined in a single interface, taking as an example the recently AI-enhanced CAT tool Wordscope. Wordscope offers an integration of translation memory, machine translation from several providers, and ChatGPT as a research and paraphrasing tool, in a de-cluttered online environment.

The paper will describe different options for using the tool for literary translation, and discuss some theoretical implications of doing so in a Cognitive Translation Studies framework. In conclusion, I will argue that Lommel’s (2018) notion that the translator’s creative capacity is ‘augmented’ rather than inhibited by computer technologies applies no less to literary than to ‘commercial’ translation, albeit in significantly different ways.