The impact of technological changes on the history of translation practice

The impact of technological changes on the history of translation practice

 

Introduction

Translation practice derives from the deliberate intention to define a post-colonial poetics of translation. Translation is a form of patricide, a deliberate refusal to repeat that which has already been presented as the original. Translation disturbs linear flows and power hierarchies, and unsettles the logo centrism of the original. Translation practice is always grounded in a set of assumptions about ways in which linguistic forms carry cultural meanings. A post-colonial perspective foregrounds the asymmetrical relationships between cultures that are also evidenced in the translation of literary texts. Understanding the complexities of textual transfer through translation is of especial importance at the present time, for multilingualism, and the cultural interactions that it entails, is the norm for millions throughout the world (Bassnett & Trivedi1999). European languages, once perceived as superior because they were the languages of the colonial masters, now interact with hundreds of languages previously marginalized or ignored outright. Translation has been at the heart of the colonial encounter, and has been used in all kinds of ways to establish and perpetuate the superiority of some cultures over others. With increasing awareness of the unequal power relations involved in the transfer of texts across cultures, people are in a position to rethink both the history of translation and its contemporary practice (Bassnett & Trivedi1999). Translation practices have been evolving due to different factors one of the factors is the advancement in technologies. This paper intends to discuss the impact of technological changes on the history of translation practice.

 

Translation and its practice

Translation is different things for different groups of people. For people who are not translators, it is primarily a text; for people who are, it is primarily an activity. Translation is a text from the perspective of external knowledge, but an activity from the perspective of internal knowledge (Robinson 2003). From the translator’s internal perspective, the activity is most important: the process of becoming a translator, receiving and handling requests to do specific translations, doing research, networking, translating words, phrases, and registers, editing the translation, delivering the finished text to the employer or client, billing the client for work completed, getting paid. The text is an important part of that process, of course – even, perhaps, the most important part but it is never the whole thing. From the non-translator’s external perspective, the text as product or commodity is most important. A great deal of thinking and teaching about translation in the past has been controlled by what is essentially external knowledge, text-oriented approaches that one might have thought of greater interest to non-translators than translators so much, in fact, that these external perspectives have in many ways come to dominate the field (Robinson 2003).

 

Traditional approaches to translation based on the non translating user’s need for a certain kind of text have only tended to focus on one of the user’s needs which is reliability. A fully user oriented approach to translation would recognize that timeliness and cost are equally important factors. Translation users need to be able to rely on translation. They need to be able to use the translation as a reliable basis for action; in the sense that if they take action on the belief that the translation gives them the kind of information they need about the original that action will not fail because of the translation. And they need to be able to trust the translator to act in reliable ways, delivering reliable translations by deadlines, getting whatever help is needed to meet those deadlines, and being flexible and versatile in serving the user’s needs. It is perhaps unfortunate, but probably inevitable, that the norms and standards appropriate for one group of users or use situations should be generalized to apply to all (Bassnett 2002).  Because some users demand literal translations and because some users demand semantic equivalence, the idea spreads that a translation that charts its own semantic path is no translation at all. Timeliness is least flexible when the translation is tied to a specific dated use situation. One of the most common complaints translators make about this quite reasonable demand of timeliness is that all too often clients are unaware of the time it takes to do a translation. The frustrating slowness of translation is one of several factors that fuel dreams of machine translation: just as computers can do calculations in nanoseconds that it would take humans hours, days, weeks to do, so too would the ideal translation machine translate in minutes a text that took five people two weeks to write (Bassnett 2002).

 

User-oriented thought about translation is product-driven: one begins with the desired end result, in this case meeting a very short deadline, and then orders it done. How it is done, at what human cost, is a secondary issue. It is not often recognized that the demand for timeliness is very similar to the demand for reliability, and thus to the theoretical norm of equivalence or fidelity. Indeed, timeliness is itself a form of reliability: when one’s conception of translation is product-driven, all one asks of the process is that it be reliable, in the complex sense of creating a solidly trustworthy product on demand. Translation has been perceived as a secondary activity, as a mechanical rather than a creative process, within the competence of anyone with a basic grounding in a language other than their own; in short, as a low status occupation (Corazza 2004). Discussion of translation products has all too often tended to be on a low level too; studies purporting to discuss translation scientifically are often little more than idiosyncratic value judgments of randomly selected translations of the work of major writers. A translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpenetration and conglomerate of two structures. On the one hand there are the semantic content and the formal contour of the original, on the other hand the entire system of aesthetic features bound up with the language of the translation. Translation Studies, therefore, is exploring new ground, bridging as it does the gap between the vast area of stylistics, literary history, linguistics, semiotics and aesthetics. But at the same time it must not be forgotten that this is a discipline firmly rooted in practical application (Corazza 2004). Translation is the process of knowing and understanding the meaning of a text and a future production of an equivalent text already changed to another language. Translation has the concepts of reliability and timeliness as factors of success. Translation and its practices have acquired changes over the years.

 

Changes in technology

Technological change is an outcome both of intentional action and serendipity. The origins of technological change reside both inside and outside individual organizations. Researchers have used the concept of technology in a variety of ways. In a narrow sense, technology refers to specific physical or tangible tools, but in a broader sense technology describes whole social processes. In the broader sense, technology refers to intangible tools (Link & Siegel 2003). Although there are analytical advantages to both the narrow and the more encompassing views, the different uses of the concept of technology invariably promote confusion at both the theoretical, empirical, and policy levels. Conceptualizing technology as the physical representation of knowledge provides a useful foundation for understanding technological change and its determinants. Any useful device is, in part, proof of the knowledge-based or informational assumptions that resulted in its creation. The information embodied in a technology varies accordingly to its source, its type, and its application. One source of information is science, although scientific knowledge is rarely sufficient for the more particular needs entailed in constructing, literally, a technological device. Science focuses on the understanding of knowledge and technology than as focusing on the application of knowledge (Link & Siegel 2003).

 

Technology, in contrast to the technological strategy, is as old as the human race itself. It has long been used to distinguish early man from other members of the primate family. While it is no longer claimed that man is the only species to use tools, man is the only species able to fashion and employ a sophisticated technology to transform the world in order to extract more from nature than it is willing to offer. It is this which makes us unique. Technology defines mankind. Technology has always been employed by humanity to improve its ability to survive and consume. But the role it has played has changed dramatically during the course of human history (Antonelli 2002). To understand that role people need to draw a distinction between technology as a dominant strategy and technology as a supportive sub strategy. As a supportive sub strategy, technology has existed throughout human history; but as a dominant dynamic strategy, technology has been employed only during critical episodes that have led to technological paradigm shifts and during the modern era since the Industrial Revolution. Human society has experienced three technological paradigm shifts: the Paleolithic shift from scavenging to hunting; the Neolithic shift from hunting to agriculture; and the modern shift from agriculture to industrialization. While each of these shifts took time to work itself out, it is only in the modern period that technological change has become a continuing strategy a continuing strategy that has had a subordinating influence on strategies, such as conquest and commerce that have been dominant in the past (Antonelli 2002).

 

Technological paradigm shift involves a fundamental change in the technological and, hence, economic foundations of human society. This enables a quantum leap in the access of mankind to the hidden bounty of natural resources and, in the process, profoundly transforms the nature of society. The human outcome of a paradigm shift is no less profound than the change in economic, social, and political organization, and includes significant increases both in regional and world populations, and in the material standards of living of these populations. While most of the technological, economic, and cultural changes inherent in a paradigm shift will be worked out at the beginning of the new economic era, there will be later periods of technological fine-tuning as the new economic system is adapted to different regions and as the ultimate possibilities of the paradigm are progressively explored and exhausted through the expansion of population. It is one thing to define what is meant by a shift in technological paradigm, but quite another to explain why it emerged (Snooks 1996). A paradigm shift occurs in a competitive environment when the old technological paradigm has been exhausted or when the existing strategies of Paleolithic family multiplication and Neolithic conquest are no longer able to satisfy the material objectives of mankind. A major characteristic of this paradigm exhaustion is the fundamental change in factor endowments that are reflected by critical changes in relative factor prices: particularly of a rise in the price of natural resources relative to both labor and capital, and of a differential impact on the prices of various natural resources. This provides powerful incentives in a competitive environment to substitute both labor and capital for natural resources in the productive process, and of new natural resources such as fossil fuels and metals for old natural resources such as timber (Snooks 1996). Technology has advanced because of the changing needs of society. It continues to change because man and his environment also change.

The impact of technological change to translation

Translation is uniquely revealing of the asymmetries that have structured international affairs for centuries. In many countries, it has been compulsory, imposed first by the introduction of colonial languages among regional vernaculars and later, after decolonization, by the need to traffic in the hegemonic lingua francas to preserve political autonomy and promote economic growth. In some countries translation is a cultural practice that is deeply implicated in relations of domination and dependence, equally capable of maintaining or disrupting them. Since translating is always addressed to specific audiences its possible motives and effects are local and contingent, differing according to major or minor positions in the global economy (Venuti 1998). This is perhaps most clear with the power of translation to form cultural identities, to create a representation of a foreign culture that simultaneously constructs a domestic subjectivity, one informed with the domestic codes and ideologies that make the representation intelligible and culturally functional. While translation has been practiced since the beginnings of civilization and translators themselves have expressed their opinions on the translation process or the products of this process from early times, the more systematic study of translation began only in the 1950s and 1960s (Venuti 1998).

 

The developments in translation was the result of a combination of factors, the most significant being a growing interest in machine translation and the emergence of university programs in translation both in Europe and in North America (Kaplan 2002). Since that time, translation research has been wide ranging, covering the translation process, translation products, translation quality assessment, methods of training translators, bilingual terminology and lexicography, the use of technology in translation, and machine translation. The abolition of trade barriers around the world, the merger of major companies, and the removal of border controls have led to economic globalization, which allows capital and products, information, and technology, as well as labor, to cross frontiers easily and speedily. This has led to an ever-increasing need for translation. Globalization has also led to greater competition in the translation market, since translators, like products and capital, can more easily work in countries other than their own. If this is the era of globalization, it is also the age of specialization. Knowledge today is highly specialized, with the increasing sophistication of all disciplines especially the scientific and technological disciplines (Kaplan 2002).

 

Specialized knowledge is communicated, at least among experts, through languages for special purposes or special languages. In order to be able to transmit such specialized knowledge accurately and appropriately in a target language, translators themselves need to be specialists, to some degree at least. They need both knowledge of the subject and knowledge of the special language used in the field. They can no longer afford to be simply generalists who possess wide general knowledge and are willing to translate in any domain. Technologization or the use of technologies in translation not only has added more areas of specialization for translators to Master but has profoundly changed the way translators work (Newton 1992). The development of translation technology has created new challenges for translators by expanding their role to include aspects such as terminology management and post editing. Moreover, translators are now called upon to do not only full translations but also summary translations to keep up with the ever-growing need for inter lingual communication. Because of additions to and permutations of the tasks of the translator, translator training has evolved to include editing, terminology production and management, and the use of translation technology (Newton 1992). With the arrival of computers, attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts or to use computers as an aid to translation. Advancements in technology helped in speeding up the process of translation. It made sure that translation will be done with minimal errors. The problem with the use of technology in translation is difference in the meaning of the original and translated text due to some words taken out of context. The use of technology reduces the chance to check words and their different meanings. This causes the disparity in analyzed and true meaning.

 

Conclusion

Technological change helped in speeding up translation but it does not assure that the true meaning of the text would be the one shown. Technological change does not assure that the text would be translated according to what it wants to convey and not its superficial meaning.

 

References

Antonelli, C 2002, The economics of innovation, New

technologies and structural change, Routledge, New York.

 

Bassnett, S 2002, Translation studies, Routledge, London.

 

Bassnett, S & Trivedi, H 1999, Post-colonial translation:

Theory and practice, Routledge, London.

 

Corazza, E 2004, Reflecting the mind: Indexicality and

Quasi-indexicality, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

 

Kaplan, RB (ed.) 2002, The oxford handbook of applied

linguistics, Oxford University Press, New York.

 

Link, AN & Siegel, DS 2003, Technological change and

economic performance, Routledge, New York.

 

Newton, J (ed.) 1992, Computers in translation: A practical

appraisal, Routledge, New York.

 

Robinson, D 2003, Becoming a translator: An introduction to

the theory and practice of translation, Routledge, London.

 

Snooks, G 1996, The dynamic society: Exploring the sources

of global change, Routledge, New York.

 

Venuti, L 1998, The scandals of translation: Towards an

ethics of difference, Routledge, London.

                  

 

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