Such an approach is informed by Lawrence Venuti's groundbreaking study The Translator's Invisibility (1995). In response to Venuti's call for greater visibility of the translator in translation studies and in translation practice, we have observed a groundswell of interest in "translatorial agency." Many studies across different world languages have focused on individual translators, seeking to foreground the contextualized and particular nature of a translator's choices at the macro and the micro levels of translation. At the same time, translators, particularly literary translators, have developed new associational and publication forums to make themselves visible to each other and to other translators ("Reading In Translation," "Words Without Borders," "Bristol Translates" etc). Now the question before us is whether these gains in translatorial visibility will be once more erased by the anonymization and randomization of translation through generative AI.
The papers in this panel propose that future translators need not be scared on these new developments, but that instructors of world languages, literatures, and translation can get ahead of the curve by proactively engaging with digital tools in the classroom. Rather than surrendering to a bleak vision of the demise of translatorial agency, these papers propose specific pedagogical strategies to empower students to learn about such tools and incorporate them in a sophisticated manner in their own learning processes.
The session will accord 15 minutes to each speaker and devote the remainder of the panel time to unstructured discussion with the audience.
Luo's presentation "AI Collaboration in Language Learning" speaks to the issue of how to incentivize and structure advanced language learning in an era of diminishing language enrollments. The paper explores how AI can allow students to tailor written texts to reach different target audiences. As such, the paper seeks to reframe generative AI as a tool that enhances translatorial agency rather than diminishing it. In a similar vein, Zhong's paper "Application of AI to Translating Culture-Specific Expressions" compares the respective validity of generative AI and machine translation in an effort to measure their usefulness with regard to culture-specific expressions. While the paper affirms the usefulness of AI as a teaching tool, it also addresses how the pedagogy around the use of AI for translation needs to take into account semantic fields and prompts. Shea's paper "Teaching Bad Translation" addresses how presumptions around the issue of "untrustworthiness" have consistently haunted translation, both as a hermeneutic suspicion and as a common practice (pseudonymous translations, pseudotranslations, fake translations). Shea's paper can thus help historicize suspicions surrounding the practice of translations, while calling for more reflection on how liminal cases of "bad translation" shape perceptions of translatorial agency. Li's "Research as Pedagogy in Teaching Digital Methods for Translation Studies" proposes to similarly empower novice translators and researchers through not only through the teaching of specific DH methods, but through the integration of research into the pedagogical approach to translation history. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) in teaching translation history, the paper seeks to demonstrate how technology, theory and translation history can be integrated in a new way. Taken together then, each presentation offers a specific method of how new translation methodologies can be harnessed to empower translators and researchers rather than having them disappeared and made invisible once more.
The panel represents a diversity of voice in terms of institutional affiliation (international universities, US research universities & liberal colleges), disciplinary affiliations (language teaching, literary studies, translation studies), translation methods (human translation, generative AI, machine translation, digital humanities) as well as pedagogical fields (advanced language instruction, literary criticism, translation history). In terms of demographics, the panel strikes a balance in terms of gender and represents different countries of origin.