This article investigates essential ethical issues that should be taken into consideration when adopting or tailoring technological tools for literary translation. The discussion on ethical issues draws on recent studies on translation technology and on the usage of machine (-assisted) translation for literary language. An overview of the consequences of the recent increase in technologization for both non-literary and literary translation is provided and an argument for sustainable development in literary translation is made, based on a holistic understanding of translation quality. The notion of voice is taken as an example of the special challenges related to the translation of literary language, which research on machine (-assisted) translation of literary language has not yet sufficiently taken into account. Lastly, avant-garde aesthetic views and usages of machine translation are presented through the notion of noise.

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Voices – marks of the tangle of subjectivities involved in textual processes – constitute the very fabric of texts in general and translations in particular. The title of this book, Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation, refers both to textual voices, that is, the voices found within the translated texts, and to contextual voices, that is, the voices of those involved in shaping, commenting on, or otherwise influencing the textual voices. The latter appear in prefaces, reviews, and other texts that surround the translated texts and provide them with a context. Our main claim is that studying both the textual and contextual voices helps us better understand and explain the complexity of both the translation process and the translation product. The dovetailed approach to translation research that is advocated in this book aims at highlighting the diversity of participants, power positions, tensions, conflicts, and debates and how they both textually and contextually materialize as voices before, during, and after the translation process.

This study builds on Taivalkoski-Shilov's (2015b) work on the reception of Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité in Finland, as translated by Kaisa Sivenius in 1998. It examines how two non-interdependent factors that proved central to the reception of Sivenius's translation in Taivalkoski-Shilov's study -paratexts and readers' academic background -affect how readers react to a translated academic text. Our empirical study on Finnish university students reading Sivenius's translation consisted of two parts: an eye-tracking study followed by short interviews and a reading task given to some participants with a request to write a narrative report. The participants were divided into five different groups with six to eight participants. We studied the effect of paratexts on three groups in an eye-tracking study, prior to which each group read a different paratext. The effect of academic background was studied by an analysis of narrative reports that two groups with different academic backgrounds (translator students and non-translator students) wrote about their reading experience. The analysis of the eye-tracking data gives some evidence that the paratexts read prior to reading the text sample influenced the participants' perspective in regard to the translation. The narrative reports indicate that the participants' academic background affected the way they reacted to Sivenius's 2 translation. Consequently, this study suggests that voices that surround both texts and their readers influence how these readers respond to translated academic texts.