Cover not available

Article published In: Literary translatorship in digital contexts
Edited by Wenqian Zhang, Motoko Akashi and Peter Jonathan Freeth
[Translation in Society 3:1] 2024
► pp. 87–103

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Literary translators in-between

An exploration of their self-imaging discourse and relationship to technology

ORCiD logo with link | Ghent University
Published online: 29 February 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tris.23015.ruf
Abstract
This article reports on a study of literary translators’ self-imaging strategies and their attitudes towards technology in the context of the increasing technologisation of the profession. Literary translators’ self-image emerges as the sum of personal as well as professional characteristics, which is in contrast with the way they believe outsiders perceive them. Participants’ narratives highlight the feeling of being misunderstood by those outside the profession, and inhabiting an in-between space, having to reconcile both contradictions inherent to literary translation and those engendered by differing views of the profession and the role technology plays in it. Results open up a new path for the study of literary translators’ self-imaging strategies by centring their voices as a means to better understand if and how technology can (1) empower translators of creative texts and (2) reduce the gap between their view of the profession and other stakeholders.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Self-image in the literary translation profession
  • 3.A growing interest in technology for literary translation
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Respondents’ background
    • 5.2The personal is professional
    • 5.3Literary translators as misunderstood
    • 5.4The interplay between self-image and technology
  • 6.Literary translators in-between
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (40)
References
Besacier, Laurent, and Lane Schwartz. 2015. “Automated Translation of a Literary Work: A Pilot Study.” In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 114–122. Denver, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew. 2009. “The Name and Nature of Translator Studies.” HERMES – Journal of Language and Communication in Business 421: 13–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cronin, Michael. 2012. Translation in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daems, Joke. 2022. “Dutch Literary Translators’ Use and Perceived Usefulness of Technology.” In Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation, edited by James Luke Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, 40–65. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Genzel, Dmitriy, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Franz Och. 2010. “‘Poetic’ Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter.” In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 158–166. Cambridge, MA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Georgiou, Nadia. 2018. “Regarding Symbolic Capital: Poetry Translators from Modern Greek into English.” HERMES – Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 581: 99–115. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greene, Erica, Tugba Bodrumlu, and Kevin Knight. 2010. “Automatic Analysis of Rhythmic Poetry with Applications to Generation and Translation.” In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 524–533. Cambridge, MA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heino, Anu. 2020. “Finnish Literary Translators and the Illusio of the Field.” New Horizons in Translation Research and Education 51: 141–157.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. “Investigating Literary Translators’ Translatorship through Narrative Identity.” In Literary Translator Studies, edited by Klaus Kaindl, Waltraud Kolb, and Daniela Schlager, 123–136. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horenberg, Lisa. 2019. “How CAT May Support Literary Translators in Source-Text Analysis, Translation and Retranslation: A Case Study of ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’.” MA diss. Utrecht University.
Kaindl, Klaus. 2021. “(Literary) Translator Studies: Shaping the Field.” In Literary Translator Studies, edited by Klaus Kaindl, Waltraud Kolb, and Daniela Schlager, 1–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kenny, Dorothy, and Marion Winters. 2020. “Machine Translation, Ethics and the Literary Translator’s Voice.” Translation Spaces 9 (1): 123–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koskinen, Kaisa, and Minna Ruokonen. 2017. “Love Letters or Hate Mail? Translators’ Affective Responses to Technology.” In Human Issues in Translation Technology, edited by Dorothy Kenny, 8–24. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Littau, Karin. 2016. “Translation and the Materialities of Communication.” Translation Studies 9 (1): 82–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macken, Lieve, Bram Vanroy, Luca Desmet, and Arda Tezcan. 2022. “Literary Translation as a Three-Stage Process: Machine Translation, Post-Editing and Revision.” In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, 101–110. Ghent: European Association for Machine Translation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moorkens, Joss, Antonio Toral, Sheila Castilho, and Andy Way. 2018. “Translators’ Perceptions of Literary Post-Editing Using Statistical and Neural Machine Translation.” Translation Spaces 7 (2): 240–262. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Brien, Sharon. 2012. “Translation as Human–Computer Interaction.” Translation Spaces 11: 101–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. 1984. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14 (3): 399–441. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ruffo, Paola. 2021. “In-Between Role and Technology: Literary Translators on Navigating the New Socio-Technological Paradigm.” PhD diss. Heriot-Watt University.
. 2022. “Collecting Literary Translators’ Narratives. Towards a New Paradigm for Technological Innovation in Literary Translation.” In Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation, edited by James Luke Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, 18–39. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. “Literary Translators and Technology: SCOT as a Proactive and Flexible Approach.” Perspectives. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ruokonen, Minna, and Jukka Mäkisalo. 2018. “Middling-Status Profession, High-Status Work: Finnish Translators’ Status Perceptions in the Light of Their Backgrounds, Working Conditions and Job Satisfaction.” The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research 10 (1): 1–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sapiro, Gisèle. 2013. “Translation and Identity: Social Trajectories of the Translators of Hebrew Literature in French.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 26 (2): 59–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “The Translators’ Personae: Marketing Translatorial Images as Pursuit of Capital.” Meta 53 (3): 609–622. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “‘Stars’ or ‘Professionals’: The Imagined Vocation and Exclusive Knowledge of Translators in Israel.” MonTi: Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación 21: 131–152. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Elite and Non-Elite Translator Manpower: The Non-Professionalised Culture in the Translation Field in Israel.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 251: 54–73.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet, and Miriam Shlesinger. 2008. “Strategies of Image-Making and Status Advancement of Translators and Interpreters as a Marginal Occupational Group: A Research Project in Progress.” In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, 79–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slessor, Stephen. 2020. “Tenacious Technophobes or Nascent Technophiles? A Survey of the Technological Practices and Needs of Literary Translators.” Perspectives 28 (2): 238–252. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2018. “Ethical Issues Regarding Machine(-Assisted) Translation of Literary Texts.” Perspectives 27 (5): 689–703. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tezcan, Arda, Joke Daems, and Lieve Macken. 2019. “When a ‘Sport’ Is a Person and Other Issues for NMT of Novels.” In Proceedings of the Qualities of Literary Machine Translation Workshop, 40–49. Dublin: European Association for Machine Translation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way. 2014. “Is Machine Translation Ready for Literature?” In Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 361, 174–176. London: AsLing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?” In Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 263–287. New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toral, Antonio, Martijn Wieling, and Andy Way. 2018. “Post-Editing Effort of a Novel with Statistical and Neural Machine Translation.” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 5 (9): 1–11. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vieira, Lucas Nunes, Natalie Zelenka, Roy Youdale, Xiaochun Zhang, and Michael Carl. 2023. “Translating Science Fiction in a CAT Tool: Machine Translation and Segmentation Settings.” Translation & Interpreting 15 (1): 216–235. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Voinova, Tanya, and Miriam Shlesinger. 2013. “Translators Talk about Themselves, Their Work and Their Profession: The Habitus of Translators of Russian Literature into Hebrew.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 26 (2): 29–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Webster, Rebecca, Margot Fonteyne, Arda Tezcan, Lieve Macken, and Joke Daems. 2020. “Gutenberg Goes Neural: Comparing Features of Dutch Human Translations with Raw Neural Machine Translation Outputs in a Corpus of English Literary Classics.” Informatics 7 (3): 32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Youdale, Roy, and Andrew Rothwell. 2022. “Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) Tools, Translation Memory and Literary Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory, edited by Sharon Deane-Cox, and Anneleen Spiessens, 381–402. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Yerdembekov, Baurzhan, Assem Kassymova, Karlygash Aubakirova & Kuralai Tulebayeva
2025. Implementation of the Alash Idea in Literary Translations (On the Example of Contemporary Kazakh Literature). Open Cultural Studies 9:1 DOI logo
Buzelin, Hélène
2024. Trajectoires, pratiques et perceptionsDes traductrices d’édition se prononcent sur l’automatisation. Palimpsestes 38 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue