Blade runner 2021: translator in the time of digital revolution

Abstract

Despite the momentous advance of digital technologies, the concerns regarding the demise of a translator’s job are a bit premature. There might come a time in some foreseeable future when the digital translation will be indistinguishable from the translation performed by a human but currently, however, this is definitely not the case — too radical is the divide between the two.

Unquestionably, the easier the task at hand, i.e., the more literal and unambiguous the lexical items constituting the original text are, the higher the quality of the digital translation. Will the AI’s scope of references be sufficient for adequate choices to be made within the language pair English — Russian, wherein polysemy poses a very significant challenge? It would be compelling to behold the Google­translated notebooks by Fyodor Dostoyevsky that abound in abbreviations, nonce­words, obsolete words and emphatic structures, or any other text, for that matter, endowed with authorial connotations and concepts, which defy unequivocal interpretation.

It is safe to assume that a translator’s trade will invariably be forced to undergo transformations; that a translator will arguably begin to resemble the famed Blade Runner from the eponymous iconic film by Sir Ridley Scott, that is, they will have to become “more human than human,” ultimately turning into a sort of a blend of Man and Machine. Still, whilst androids and omnipotent AI algorithms have not yet altogether overpowered the world at large, the vocation of a translator qua bearer and repository of creative consciousness and intuition, which the machines are sorely lacking, will remain in high demand. This is precisely what the paper aims to discuss.

References

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