《2016 pym what technology does to translation》.pdf

What technology does to translating Anthony Pym Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona, Spain Working version 3. June 2011 Abstract: The relation between technology and translating is part of the wider question of what technology does to language. It is now a key question because new translation technologies such as translation memories, data-based machine translation, and collaborative translation management systems, far from being merely added tools, are altering the very nature of the translator’s cognitive activity, social relations, and professional standing. Here we argue that technologies first affect memory capacity in such a way that the paradigmatic is imposed more frequently on the syntagmatic. It follows that the translating activity is enhanced in its generative moment, yet potentially retarded in the moment of selection, where the values of intuition and text flow become difficult to recuperate. The redeeming grace of new technologies may nevertheless lie in new modes of opening translation to the space of volunteer translation, where humanizing dialogue can enter the internal space of translation decisions. The regime of the paradigmatic may thus be embedded in new modes of social exchange, where translation becomes one of the five basic language skills. 1. Memory complicates decision-making Technology should help us with whatever we are doing. The ape uses a stick to retrieve the banana – we reach further, so we can do more. Technology thus extends the ways we interact with the world: our arms, our sight, our capacity to hear, touch, to move over distance. Which of these extensions most vitally affect what we do with language? The question allows for many suppositions. The technologies of transport and communication radically stretch the cross-cultural situations in which speech acts are carried out, ultimately altering the configuration of cultures, never more so than in a globalizing age.