Technology, translation and society

Abstract

Technology, translation and society: a constructivist, critical theory approach Maeve OlohanTranslation studies and social theories of translation tend not to deal adequately with questions regarding the role of technology in translation and have neglected the ways in which technologies, as non-human entities, embody and materialize hegemonic and power relations. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming by looking to science and technology studies (STS) for conceptual frameworks to help us to understand and articulate a) how popular, deterministic perceptions of translation technology are perpetuated through the discourses of hegemonic actors, b) how decisions regarding design and use of translation technologies may be studied with reference to their construction and interpretation by relevant social groups, and c) how a critical theory of technology and an analytical focus on practices can help to focus our attention on the exercise of hegemonic control in the translation sector.

Teknologiavälitteinen kääntäminen

“…García 2015). Teknologian rooli käännösten tuotantotaloudessa onkin monitahoinen kysymys, johon vaikuttavat teknologisten näkökulmien lisäksi monet taloudelliset ja sosiaaliset näkökohdat (Baumgarten & Cornellà-Detrell 2018;Olohan 2017). Sosioekonomisesti kestävä käännösteknologian käyttö edellyttää siis tarkempaa tutkimusta.…”

Introducing Interreal Translations

“…Another direction focuses on the increasingly complex relations between translation and technology, ranging from the well-established field of machine translation (MT) -including both technical (Stahlberg 2020) and societal (Nunes Viera et al 2021) angles -to the impact on labour of translation platforms (Fırat 2021). Critical approaches to the role of technology in translation have focused both on its possible impacts (Olohan 2017) and on the changes that it can bring on translation as a practice that can be now framed as a form of Human-Computer Interaction (O'Brien 2020) and applied to computer code (St André 2023).…”