ESLT Summer School - Keynote door Lawrence Venuti

De tekst gaat verder in het Engels

To combat the misunderstanding, exploitation, and marginality that translators worldwide continue to encounter, we must advance an understanding and practice of translation as at once learned and creative. The illusionism of textual transparency produced by fluent, easily readable translations renders the translator’s work invisible. Yet this effect requires not that fluency be abandoned, but that the linguistic parameters of readability be questioned and broadened, not that the assimilationist drive in every translation be suppressed, but that it be interrogated, not that translators acquiesce before their secondary status, but that they comment on their own work and that of other translators in interviews and reviews, essays and monographs.

Similarly, the dominant conception of translation remains instrumental, wherein it is understood as the reproduction or transfer of a source-text invariant, whether formal, semantic, or effective, reducing the translator’s work to mechanical substitution. Instrumentalism must be replaced with a hermeneutic model of translation as an interpretive act that inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving situation. To translate is to assume not that equivalence be either restricted or jettisoned, but that various relations of equivalence are possible, not that translators construct a one-to-one correspondence to the source text, but that they self-consciously inscribe an interpretation which engages with the discourses circulating in cultural and social institutions, whether in the source or translating languages.

Neural machine translators trained on parallel corpora of source texts and their translations (Google Translate, DeepL) and generative artificial intelligence trained on data in different domains (ChatGPT, DeepSeek) pose a dire threat to human translation by raising the spectre of extinction through obsolescence. How can these electronic tools be leveraged to establish a new necessity for the work of the human translator? If they possesses a basic level of literary translational competence, making them capable of translating accurately and fluently, they might be employed to enlarge the interpretive acts that every human translator performs. We must harness the machine in innovative translations so as to intervene in the conflict of interpretations that define our humanity, where value accrues in critical opposition to institutional authority, opening a space of difference, revaluation, dissent.

Please join us for this free public event, which will take place on Wednesday 10 September 2025 from 16.00 to 17.30 (CEST).

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