Translators and interpreters in the digital age face manifold opportunities and challenges that are only compounded as Artificial Intelligence in the form of Large Language Models moves into the public sphere. This seminar explores how new forms of technology and media shape the work of translation and prompt new forms of reading and engaging with archives or bringing the past into the present and future. We consider ethical and philosophical implications of emerging translation technologies. How do new translation technologies and literary ecosystems disrupt notions of authorship, textuality, and agency? What translation interventions are warranted to safeguard and lend visibility to minority languages and marginalized subjects? What are the particular perils and opportunities for translators in an era of globalization and our shared susceptibility to crises such as pandemics, the manipulation of information, and a changing climate? We ask what translators and translation theorists might offer a world coming to terms with new problems of language, communication, truth, and representation.

This seminar, organized by the ICLA Translation Studies Research Committee, invites abstracts interrogating digital translation encounters from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives—literary, historical, sociolinguistic, ethical—and considers themes including but not limited to the following:

Translation and AI

Translation and the Digital Archive

Translation and the Nonhuman

Translation and Globalization

Translation and Crisis

Translation Equity and Agency

Translation Justice in the Digital Era

Collaborative Translation

Translation and Affect

Translation and Intermediality

The term "influence" in English comes from Old French "influence," which means "emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny" (13th C). Mediaeval Latin ‘influentia’ means ‘a flow of water, a flowing in.’ France is where the ‘idea of littérature comparée’ became a necessary and full-fledged discipline, and the institutional establishment there is based on the concept of ‘influence’ which lies at the intersection of ‘relations’ and ‘inspirations.’ Initially the French School of Comparative Literature focussed on the contributions of French literary texts and authors to other European literatures and vice versa, so it's easy to see the implicit colonialist project in its formation. The present paper will question how, through the rise of ‘la littérature comparée,’ the French language, literature, authors, texts and culture played the role of ‘emitter,’ which was acting upon the European character and destiny, which would further ‘flow into’ the veins of colonial territory and like water, a regenerative force, attempting invigoration of the ‘stagnated’ literary culture through generic influence, literary morphology and cultural imitation.

René Wellek's 1958 address “The Crisis in Comparative Literature” and René Étiemble's 1963 monograph "Comparaison n'est pas raison" opened the floodgates to using ‘crisis’ and ‘anxiety’ as starting points for Comparative Literature discussions. This research will examine Wellek and Étiemble's political historical contexts—the totalitarian regime in Germany during World War II and the political crisis in France during the Algerian War of Independence—to determine how their comments on the discipline's vulnerability were influenced. Ulrich Weisstein's patronage of "Comparative Arts," Susan Bassnett's switch to "Translation Studies," and Gayatri Spivak's intellectual investment in "Planetarity" will be examined in the paper, along with institutional/disciplinal politics and Comparative Literature's crisis.

The present paper will also look at the beginning of the disciplinal journey of Comparative Literature in India by investigating the literary history of the establishment of the first Department of Comparative Literature in India as well as in Asia at Jadavpur University in 1956 and trace how the American School of Comparative Literature impacted Buddhadeva Bose during his teaching tenure at Pennsylvania College for Women. Taking inferences from the above-mentioned critical investigations across French, American and Indian schools of Comparative Literature, I will argue that it is time to question the over-generalizations of terms like ‘inter-disciplinary’ and ‘in-disciplinary’ especially in the present decade. This research acknowledges the inevitable presence of ‘binary pitfalls’ in ‘comparison’ and argues to explore fluidity as a conceptual metaphor to understand the ‘in-comparative’ framework.