AI and literary translation : CEATL hosts a webinar with Prof. Dorothy Kenny

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies -- whether based on 'conventional' neural machine translation (NMT) or more recently released large language models (LLMs) -- are finding increasing application in literary translation, despite the serious misgivings of literary translators' associations and other stakeholders. In this webinar I provide a basic overview of these technologies, and explore how they have been optimized for use in literary translation and tested in various research scenarios. I home in on the professional, legal, ethical and aesthetic issues that arise when NMT and LLMs are used in literary translation and make the case for continued research in this controversial field, as long as that research involves human literary translators.

Dorothy Kenny is full professor of translation studies at Dublin City University. Her current research interests include corpus-based analyses of translation and translator style, literary applications of automatic translation and approaches to the teaching of translation technology. Her most recent book is the open-access edited volume Machine translation for everyone: empowering users in the age of artificial intelligence (Language Science Press, 2022). She is co-editor with Joss Moorkens of the journal Translation Spaces and an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (UK).