Article published In: Fair MT: Towards ethical, sustainable Machine Translation
Edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny and Félix do Carmo
[Translation Spaces 9:1] 2020
► pp. 123–149
Machine translation, ethics and the literary translator’s voice
Published online: 17 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00024.ken
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00024.ken
Abstract
Recent work in translation studies has established the literary translator’s voice as an ethical concern, but
there has been little empirical research so far into how the translator’s voice is affected in workflows involving machine
translation. In this article, we investigate how the use of neural machine translation influences the textual voice (Alvstad, Cecilia, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen, and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov (eds). 2017. Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ) of renowned translator from English into German, Hans-Christian
Oeser. Based on an experiment in which Oeser post-edits an excerpt from a novel he had previously translated, we show how his
textual voice is somewhat diminished in his post-edited work compared to its stronger manifestation in his translation work. At
the same time Oeser’s contextual voice (ibid.) remains strong in his comments on the text he produces in post-editing mode. The
article is offered as a methodological intervention and represents an initial attempt to design studies in literary machine
translation that put the focus on human translators, allowing their voices to be heard more clearly than has previously been the
case.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Voice and its ethical import in translation
- Textual and contextual voice
- The translator’s voice in recent approaches to themachine translation of literature
- Towards more ecologically valid approaches to the study of literary translators at work
- Research design
- Participant
- Experiment set up
- Research questions
- Research materials
- Procedure
- Analysis
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
References (40)
Alvstad, Cecilia, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen, and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov (eds). 2017. Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Baker, Mona. 2000. “Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator.” Target 12(2): 241–266.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Besacier, Laurent. 2014. “Traduction automatisée d’une oeuvre littéraire: Une étude pilote” [Automatic translation of a literary work: A pilot study]. Paper presented at the 21ème Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN 2014), Marseille. Accessed 30 March 2020, [URL]
Bisiada, Mario. 2018. “Translation and editing: a study of editorial treatment of nominalisations in draft translations.” Perspectives 26(1): 24–38.
Borg, Claudine. 2016. A literary translation in the making: an in-depth investigation into the process of a literary translation from French into Maltese. PhD Thesis. Birmingham: Aston University. Accessed 21 March 2020, [URL]
Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations: Traduction et discours rapporté. Montreal: Balzac.
Greenall, Annjo K. 2015. “Translators’ voices in Norwegian retranslations of Bob Dylan’s songs.” Target 27(1): 40–57.
Greenall, Annjo K., Cecilia Alvstad, Hanne Jansen and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov (eds). 2019. Perspectives 27(5) Special Issue on Voice, Ethics and Translation.
Hermans, Theo. 1996. “The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative.” Target 8(1): 23–48.
Kenny, Dorothy. 2006. “Corpus-based Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?” Journal of Translation Studies 9(1): 43–58.
. 2011a. “The Ethics of Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the NZSTI Annual Conference 2011, edited by Sybille Ferner, 121–31. Auckland: NZSTI.
. 2011b. “Translation Units and Corpora.” In Corpus-Based Translation Studies. Research and Applications, edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach and Jeremy Munday, 76–102. London: Continuum.
. 2020. “Machine Translation.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 305–310. London: Routledge.
Kolb, Waltraud. 2017. ““It was on my mind all day.” Literary translators working from home – some implications of workplace dynamics.” Translation Spaces 6(1): 27–43.
Lee, Tong King. 2011. “The death of the translator in machine translation.” Target 23 (1): 92–112.
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.
Munday, Jeremy. 2008. Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English. London: Routledge.
Pekkanen, Hilkka. 2010. The Duet between the Author and the Translator: An Analysis of Style through Shifts in Literary Translation. PhD Thesis. University of Helsinki. Accessed 26 March 2020, [URL]URN:ISBN:978-952-10-6107-3.
Poncharal, Bruno. 2020. “La TA face à la traduction de l’argumentation dans les textes de SHS.” La traduction littéraire et SHS à la rencontre des technologies de la traduction : enjeux, pratiques et perspectives. Translating Europe Workshop 2020, 07 February, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès.
Risku, Hanna. 2017. “Ethnographies of Translation and Situated Cognition.” In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, edited by John W. Schwieter and Aline Ferreira. 290–310. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
Risku, Hanna, Regina Rogl and Jelena Milosevic (eds). 2017. Translation Practice in the Field. Special Issue of Translation Spaces, 6(1).
Rothwell, Andrew. 2020. “Retranslating Zola in Stereo with CAT Tools”. La traduction littéraire et SHS à la rencontre des technologies de la traduction : enjeux, pratiques et perspectives. Translating Europe Workshop 2020, 07 February, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès.
Saldanha, Gabriela. 2011. “Translator Style: Methodological Considerations.” The Translator 17 (1): 25–50.
Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. “There Is Always a Teller in a Tale.” Target 8(1): 1–21.
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2013. “Voice in the Field of Translation Studies.” In La Traduction des voix intra-textuelles / Intratextual Voices in Translation, edited by Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov and M. Suchet, 1–9. Montreal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre.
. 2019. “Ethical Issues Regarding Machine(-assisted) Translation of Literary Texts.” Perspectives 27(5): 689–703.
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina and Maarit Koponen. 2017. “Contextual factors when reading a translated academic text.” In Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation, edited by Cecilia Alvstad, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen, and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, 81–99. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Toral, Antonio and Andy Way. 2015. “Translating Literary Text between Related Languages using SMT.” In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 123–132. Denver, Colorado.
. 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. Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing.
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).
Wang, Qing and Defeng Li. 2020. “Looking for Translators’ Fingerprints: A Corpus-based Study on Chinese Translations of Ulysses.” In Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts, edited by Kaibao Hu and Kyung Hye Kim, 155–179. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Winters, Marion. 2004. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Die Schönen und Verdammten: A Corpus-based Study of Loan Words and Code Switches as Features of Translators’ Style.” Language Matters, Studies in the Languages of Africa 35(1): 248–58.
. 2005. A corpus-based study of translator style: Oeser’s and Orth-Guttmann’scorpus-based study of translator German translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
. 2007. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Die Schönen und Verdammten: A Corpus-based Study of Speech-act Report Verbs as a Feature of Translators’ Style.” Meta 52(3): 412–425.
. 2009. “Modal particles explained. How modal particles creep into translations and reveal translators’ styles.” Target 21(1): 74–97.
. 2010. “From modal particles to point of view: a theoretical framework for the analysis of translator attitude.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 5(2): 163–185.
Cited by (32)
Cited by 32 other publications
Andrade Preciado, Jahiro Samar, Héctor Javier Sánchez Ramírez, Ángeles Belém Priego Sánchez & Esther Elena Gutiérrez Pérez
Bowker, Lynne
He, He & Bing Xiong
Noriega-Santiáñez, Laura & Gloria Corpas Pastor
Yao, Xiaofang, Yong-Bin Kang & Anthony McCosker
Bourget, Juliette
Brusasco, Paola & Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov
Buzelin, Hélène
Corpas Pastor, Gloria & Laura Noriega-Santiáñez
Dallı, Harun, Olgun Dursun, Tunga Güngör, Sabri Gürses, Ena Hodzik, Mehmet Şahin & Zeynep Yirmibeşoğlu
Du, Jiaying & Jiabi Lu
Gürses, Sabri, Mehmet Şahin, Ena Hodzik, Tunga Güngör, Harun Dallı & Olgun Dursun
Hansen, Damien
Hao, Yu, Ke Hu & Anthony Pym
Mamaeva, E. E.
Ruffo, Paola
Ruffo, Paola
Ruffo, Paola, Joke Daems & Lieve Macken
Sarhsian, Evelina Levonivna & Olha Andriivna Zinchenko
van Egdom, Gys-Walt
Wu, Kan & Dechao Li
Ye, Chunbo
Hongtao, Wang
2023. Defending the last bastion. Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation
Kolb, Waltraud, Wolfgang U. Dressler & Elisa Mattiello
2023. Human and machine translation of occasionalisms in literary texts. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 35:4 ► pp. 540 ff.
Li, Yajie, Muhammad Alif Redzuan bin Abdullah & Ling Yann Wong
Liu, Yutong, Shile Zhang & Arpit Bhardwaj
Ramírez-Polo, Laura & Chelo Vargas-Sierra
Wang, Yuzhe & Dandan Ji
Arhire, Mona
Guerberof-Arenas, Ana & Antonio Toral
2020. The impact of post-editing and machine translation on creativity and reading experience. Translation Spaces 9:2 ► pp. 255 ff.
Guerberof-Arenas, Ana & Antonio Toral
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.