“Social Conversations, Online/Digital Visibility, and Translation Studies”

CTIS Research Seminar, presented by Dr Renée Desjardins, Université de Saint-Boniface

Thursday 28 April 2022 at 2pm BST

Participation on campus: Room 3.62, Simon Building (no. 59 on this campus map). No registration is needed.

Participation online: Registration in advance is required at: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMucuCtpjspHt0uI5pAODR7mbqPtTrpTSLp

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event via Zoom.

Social Conversations, Online/Digital Visibility, and Translation Studies

As artificial intelligence and automation gain ground, recent research in Translation Studies examining technological shifts tends to focus on machine translation (MT) (e.g. MT literacy; developing MT; MT in pedagogical/training contexts). This makes sense to the degree that machine translation, particularly neural machine translation, has changed many aspects of the translation profession and has sparked a number of questions around translation valuation and ethics. In this talk, I shift the tech focus to another arena: that of social media. Even though online social platforms have existed for over twenty years, some still view online social content as subordinate to literary or legacy news texts. Yet, if we consider that TikTok influencers are now being briefed by high-level government officials in times of crisis (to name only this example), it is increasingly difficult to argue against the staying power and social relevance of these platforms. When we think of content creation, content creator, and influencer economies, rarely do we think of translation. However, translation is ubiquitous on online social platforms and it fuels the creator economy in perhaps unexpected ways. Using examples from Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, I indicate how social conversations can be insightful for the study of content reception and translation quality. Further, I argue that these social conversations contribute to the visibility or even ubiquity of translation and how Translation Studies, as a field of study, can leverage this.

Renée Desjardins is an associate professor at the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg (Treaty 1), Canada. She is the author of Translation and Social Media: In Theory, in Training, and in Professional Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the co-editor of When Translation Goes Digital: Case Studies and Critical Reflections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She has been researching and writing about translation and social media for over a decade and has published on the subject in a number of other outlets, including The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics, and in a special issue of Translation Studies on “Social Translation”. Her most recent work examines the Manitoba government’s online and digital translation strategy (or lack thereof) in the handling of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic

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Call for Papers AIM2022: Artificial Intelligence and Minority

Computational Approaches to Multilingual Historical Research

Submission deadline: 29 April 2022 (11:59 PM CET)
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aim2022
Web: https://bit.ly/3MiN1WJ

The University of Groningen’s Department of History of Philosophy and Center for Digital Humanities are inviting submissions to the “AIM2022: AI and Minority” international conference to be held from 28 to 30 September 2022.

The event seeks to bring together scholars at various stages of their careers who work in the history of philosophy or cognate areas in cultural history and the humanities broadly defined, and who use AI-inflected approaches to bring to life neglected figures, unrepresented language groups and racial profiles, as well as any historical aspect(s) that go(es) beyond the canon of their disciplines. While AI is often related to gender and racial bias, we aim to focus on machine intelligence as a potentially welcome companion to traditional forms of humanistic inquiry and on minorness as paramount for the study of the human past. The conference thus seeks to encourage collaborative, inter-, trans,- and post-disciplinary forms of scholarship across different aspects of minority in AI-enabled cultural history research.

Furthermore, we recognize that multilingualism is inextricably related to the human past and present and that the cultural, social, or political investigation of human history often needs to engage with multilingual corpora in order to be truly cognizant of diversity. In digital humanities, it was only relatively recently that language started to be acknowledged as critical for the high dimensional nature of historic data (Spence et al. 2021 Purschke and Schmalz 2022 forth., Purschke 2020). While the so-called ‘major(ity)’ languages have been prevalent in most digital book and manuscript repositories and in digital scholarly editions, computational historic research has tended to focus on one or the other of these languages due to available and readily-accessible language-agnostic technology. However, recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as multilingual word vectors (Sangiacomo et al. 2021; Bhattacharya et al. 2019; Ulčar et al. 2021) and (machine) translation (Tanasescu et al 2021; Edman et al. 2021), make possible the investigation of trans- and multilingual corpora and open up new avenues in overcoming the monolingual bias.

Applicants are encouraged to explicitly address the minority stakes of their interdisciplinary research in the following fields: history of philosophy, history and philosophy of science, ethics, social and political philosophy, and cultural studies. Although the conference specifically encourages contributions to multilingual, AI-enabled historical research, the program is also open to monolingual minority-dedicated cross-disciplinary projects.

The panels will be organized according to the following broad and more specific topics, although innovative contributions beyond these are also encouraged:

• geo-cultural diversity in intellectual history
• ethics of multilingual historical research
• (translingual) text mining and network analysis in computational history
• language-aware tools and approaches for history research
• quantitative approaches to marginalized groups in philosophy
• peripheral approaches to philosophy
• translations, multiple editions, and linguistic diversity in the humanities
• multilingualism in the philosophy of medicine and biology
• socially relevant philosophy in science and engineering

Instructions for applicants:
Applicants should submit a title, a 300-word abstract, 5 keywords, and a short bio by 29 April 2022 via EasyChair. They will be notified of the outcome of their submission by 15 May.

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aim2022

Keynote speakers:
Dr Christoph Purschke (University of Luxemburg) Dr Diana Roig Sanz (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)