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Talk 2

Professor Anthony Pym

School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne
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Rebranding translation

Translation studies has enjoyed spectacular success over recent decades, spreading out from Europe and diversifying in the process. Thanks in part to a spate of handbooks, it is now possible to take stock of a few long-term trends. In particular, one notes a tendency to ever-broader concepts of translation, a felt need for social and political engagement, a correspondingly diminishing attention to languages, a corresponding lack of attention to linguistics, sporadic attempts to reconcile human and machine translation, and a growing separation of theoretical from empirical approaches.

Languages still exist, however; the need to communicate across languages is growing; and most of the traditional models of translation are no longer up to the task. This has been very evident in the translation of pandemic-related information in Melbourne, a city where more than 250 languages are spoken. In working on the problems of that kind of communication, I have come to see that the very basic models of print-culture Western translation no longer suffice. We do not work between languages in separate countries – we work in multilingually superdiverse cities. We do not work on natural language only – we communicate in the spoken word and in audiovisual media. We do not work in academic opposition to language learning – translation is at work in all adult language learning. We are not looking back to reproduce a past message – we are tasked with achieving effects in the future. And we are not pitting human translation against machine translation – we must all find ways to benefit from growing automation. Underlying all these aspects, we can no longer work to defend a narrow profession – we must instead help and improve translation as a very widespread creative social activity.

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