Translation is mostly understood as a lonely activity and calls for discussions on the subjectivity of the translator, her language proficiency, her close reading of the text and the resultant understanding reflecting in the act of translation. However, Anthony Cordingley and Celine Frigau Manning (2017) raise a series of very pertinent questions that challenges the popular image of the translator as a lonely individual at work since the reality of the profession is strikingly different and requires a collaboration of many with different roles. Belen Bistué (2013), traces the practice of collaborative translation to the Renaissance time. She calls the translation of those time the work of “translation teams” where “two or more translators, each an expert in one of the languages involved, collaborated to produce a translation”. This act of distributing responsibilities among multiple agents involved in the practice helped in the inclusion of skills they brought from different linguistic and cultural traditions. This paper would, however, want to look at collaborative translation as an alternate method of translating and preserving indigenous oral literature. This paper will question how collaboration that brings together native speakers can help in eradicating epistemological violence and misrepresentation in translation of indigenous texts? Can this inclusive method of translation become a tool of academic social responsibility of informed translators? How can digitization of translations of oral narratives can help in the preservation and circulation of indigenous literature?

This paper aims at mediating into networks of AI as sites of creativity, and that of cultural translation, which is facilitated through the shared socialites of language use in speech-acts as well as creative writing. With generative AI and LLMs intervening into this site, questions regarding the creation, production, acquisition and dissemination of knowledge become inevitable. While the contribution of AI and LLMs in creative practices is undeniably important, this paper rethinks the manner in which these models acquire existing knowledge and generate responses, thus engaging with the technicalities of prompt engineering and AI training along with concerns of ethics and representation. One of the contributions of text generative AI and LLMs in language use is the act of facilitating a decolonial approach to translation. For researchers working on areas emerging from a decolonial context, the use of such language models becomes challenging and limiting. While projects involving the use of English or other European languages might benefit from these models and incorporate the practice of translation and transcription and data sampling among other practices, those engaging with alternate, marginalized languages and peripheral contexts draw our attention to the limitations inherent in the current LLMs and generative AI models. Even with advanced LLMs, problems such as context window paradox or AI hallucination pose limitations for creative translations. Highlighting the limitations of LLMs in understanding the creative aspect of language, this paper further draws our attention to the manner in which poetic language renders itself inaccessible to computation for AI and hence the aberrations and absurdities. Consequently it mandates a human intervention in the process to ensure ethical considerations and prevent misrepresentation especially for marginal and oral language-cultures. Finally, this study aims to forge newer ways of Human-AI engagement which is underscored by the concerns of plurality and untranslatability emanating from a decolonial context, thus aid in the destandardization or undo standardisation of marginalized languages.

This paper explores a reading mode for now by experimenting with machine/human translation and re-visiting reading theories. It aims to address a series of interlinking literate changes in this digital era and seeks to answer the following questions: how we attune our reading to an AI-assisted/enhanced one, as N. Katherine Hayles says; how AI production suggests different interpretations of a text; and how we navigate them through reading skills and philosophy offered by Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, and Jonathan Culler. These cares evoke an investigation at a conjuncture between classic language, translation, and reading.

My writing departs by comparatively reading Han-shan the Tang poet’s poem in classical Chinese and its two English renditions by Gary Snyder and ChatGPT, respectively. Surface reading denotes their discrepancies in verbal structure and poetic philosophy while close reading highlights a potential to better the understanding of Han-shan’s original. To gain a wider valence, I recruit around 30 participants with a good command of both languages to evaluate the two translations and identify which comes from AI. Concluding with reflection on survey results and re-examination of key notions, this paper emphasizes that what we are reading now is a co-shaped, filtered Text in Barthes’s term and meaningful exchanges rise from testing these filters and re-painting their contours.

This project examines the many points of overlap in conversations about information literacy and translation literacy in the university classroom and muses on how new digital tools and archives incite urgency toward these intersecting competencies or modes of reading and interpreting. As Brian Baer argues, “given that so many of the texts students encounter both inside and outside the classroom are translations, and that machine translation tools are so readily available, it is time for translation literacy to be a key component of both information and global literacy” (4). By translation literacy, I mean the general ability to recognize the mediated experience of reading a translated text and to think critically about the form and socially-situated practice of translation, a mode of literacy that Anthony Pym describes as “the ability to make informed decisions about when to turn to translations, how to read them, how to compare them, when to trust them, when to intervene in them, and [. . .] how to produce them.” In particular, I evaluate the gains of involving students in disparate English translations of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and the ready transferability of information literacy concepts like “reading laterally,” “going upstream,” and looking for bias, sensationalism, and marking the ideological underpinnings of any given source and its subsequent versions or iterations. Through my case study of using digital tools to bring translation literacy into the classroom, I aim to put the metalanguage of information literacy in conversation with recurrent questions and concepts of translation literacy and translation theory.

Sources:

Baer, Brian James. “Is there a Translation in this Class?: A Crash Course in Translation Literacy.” In Teaching Literature in Translation: Pedagogical Contexts and Reading Practices. Edited by Brian James Baer and Michelle Woods. Routledge, 2023. 3-12.

Pym, Anthony. “Active Translation Literacy in the Literature Class.” PMLA 138, 3, May 2023: 819-823. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/active-translation-literacy-in-the-literature-class/AA9D71A6C29677BF1D784FC0379786E5