The human in the loop: relay literary translation and minoritised languages in the AI era

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Darryl Sterk to deliver the keynote lecture for this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on literary translation, AI, and the future of minoritised languages.

This talk will reflect on the conditions of translation, particularly of literature, in the AI era. The focus will be on minoritised languages. While Mandarin could be considered a minoritised language globally, the languages that are truly minoritised, meaning marginalised or somehow subordinated, tend to be those spoken by small minorities such as Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples. 

Texts, including literary texts, recorded or written in such languages tend to have to be relay translated to reach a global audience. Such is the case with texts in Taiwan’s Indigenous languages, which have had to be relay translated through Japanese and Chinese to reach English-speaking readers over the past century. Contemporary relay translation in the other direction, from majority languages like English through Chinese into Indigenous minority languages, might stimulate the development of these languages.

A case in point is an ongoing attempt to translate Charlotte’s Web and The Hobbit into Sediq, a dialect of a language that is also known as Seediq, Seejiq, and Taroko, by the speaker Darryl Sterk and the Presbyterian pastor Watan Diro. This case shows that modern MT (Machine Translation) and Gen AI (Generative Artificial Intelligence) are changing the conditions of translation of literary works from global languages to national languages; translation at various stages of the process can be semi-automated while keeping the human in the loop. This case also suggests that we are nearing a new frontier: semi-automated literary translation to and from truly minoritised languages.

Image credit: ThisisEngineering via Unsplash.