PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION IN A PRE-SINGULARITY WORLD IMPLICATIONS, EXCEPTIONS, TRAINING Joanna Drugan Senior Lecturer in Applied Translation Studies School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies University of East Anglia

WILL ALL TRANSLATORS BE REPLACED BEFORE THE SINGULARITY? NO (BUT…)

WHY NO? 1. Translators’ views

WHY NO?

WHY NO?

WHY NO?

WHY NO? 2. Experience - Graduate profiles - Student numbers - Long history of translation - History and characteristics of Homo Sapiens

AS MT IMPROVES, WHAT TYPES OF TRANSLATION WILL STILL NEED PROFESSIONAL HUMAN TRANSLATORS?

PROFESSIONAL HUMAN TRANSLATORS still needed for… Novelty ‘Human-ness’ Security Certain languages, pairs, directions

BBC world service: Soft power

security

PROFESSIONAL HUMAN TRANSLATORS still needed for… Novelty ‘Human-ness’ Security Certain languages, pairs, directions

LANGUAGE PAIRS Today we’re putting Google neural Machine Translation into action with a total of eight language pairs to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. These represent the native languages of around one-third of the world's population, covering more than 35% of all Google Translate queries! While we’re starting with eight language pairs within Google Search the Google Translate app, and website; our goal is to eventually roll Neural Machine Translation out to all 103 languages and surfaces where you can access Google Translate. https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-more-accurate-fluent-sentences- google-translate/ 27 September 2016

WHY NO, But…? ‘Translation’ and ‘translators’ need to be broadly defined and will evolve: different roles and approaches Growing importance of - User-Centred Translation (Suojanen et al., 2015) - Community Translation (Taibi and Ozolins, 2016) - Intercultural communication (Yates, 2015) Quality

WHY NO, but…?

what does this mean for translator training?

TRANSLATOR TRAINING - Longer term - Broader: education rather than training - Understanding means we can change outcomes