Technology, translation

Critical engagement with the role of technologies in translation has been slow in emergingwithin translation studies but has been gathering pace since the second decade of thiscentury. As translation becomes more fully understood as social practice and is increasinglystudied through sociological lenses, the materials and tools involved in that practice are alsobeginning to come to the fore. The practice of translating, like writing, has always involvedtechnologies, and those technologies have emerged and evolved over time in relation to asociety’s cultural and socioeconomic needs. Gabrial (2008) traces the development ofmanual, mechanical and electric/electronic writing technologies, from stone inscriptions toink quills on parchment, from printing presses to typewriters, from Morse code to desktoppublishing. Many of these developments depended, in turn, on other technologies,including paper production, universal postal systems, the personal computer and theinternet. Much of the history of translation technologies could be narrated along similarlines. However, when translation technologies are discussed by translation scholars, thefocus tends to be limited to digital technologies and, even more specifically, to translationmemory (TM) and machine translation (MT) software. For instance, Chan’s (2015) overviewof the history of translation technology starts in 1967. Other narratives typically begin in the1950s, with the development of machine translation systems (Hutchins 2015). A notableexception is Cronin’s (2013) Translation in the Digital Age, one of the few examples ofscholarship that engages profoundly with notions of technology and translation throughtheir long histories, into present-day contexts and beyond.