Lectures

Michael Cronin

In Other Words: Translating the Non-human on Screen

Climate change is fundamentally a crisis in our relation to the living world. The climate crisis has challenged the doctrine of human exceptionalism, whereby humans are masters and possessors of the natural world and thus uniquely equipped to subordinate it to their own needs. Rather than asserting human autonomy and supremacy, the crisis has revealed human dependency and vulnerability. The profound mutation in our relation to the world demands a new way of thinking that allows us to explore how humans might now relate to their environment. Part of this mutation relates to how we represent the more-than-human world. I want to explore the role of screen translation in constructing an environmental imaginary for humans and to what extent we need to more reflexive in our translational practices in the wake of the climate crisis.

Tessa Dwyer

Yiddish On-Demand: Unorthodox, Pseudo-Subtitling and Netflix Originals

Set in Brooklyn, New York amongst the Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Jewish community, the award-winning, limited series Unorthodox (2020) marks a milestone for streaming TV giant Netflix as its first original production to feature Yiddish — the stateless, diasporic language of Jewish culture that dates back to 10thC Central and Eastern Europe and is categorised by UNESCO as ‘endangered’. In this talk, I examine the role and function of Yiddish in Unorthodox to ask broader questions about cultural diversity, language symbolism and translation in the streaming TV era. How does language diversification and prestige subtitling fit into the Netflix brand? Mobilising Carol O’Sullivan’s concept of ‘pseudo-subtitling’ in relation to global streaming and on-demand distribution, I consider how the use of Yiddish in Unorthodox registers the new visibility and authenticity effects of heterolingualism and translation within transforming media and televisual ecologies.

Minako O’Hagan

Ethics of AVT in the age of AI and Volunteers

A powerful lesson emerging from the current health crisis is how humans crave “trust”. Centred on the concept of trust, I reflect on professional translators’ increasing co-existence with the machine as well as with volunteer translation which is shaping the future of AVT, and in turn the ethics of AVT.

The pandemic turned out to have a direct impact on the visibility of AVT in society, as many of us increased screen time both at work and for leisure. The popular conferencing platform Zoom now incorporates free live captioning, with machine learning boosting the quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR), usable in some contexts but by no means error-free. It has likely raised awareness of accessibility AVT and demonstrated the future scope of ASR when its accuracy improves. Speech technologies combined with AI are also making inroads into game localisation where lip-synching for dubbing (which is called voiceover or VO in the game industry) is achieved automatically across different languages. This has implications for human-based VO and possibly for the prestige of this mode currently reserved only for top markets. The demand for AVT has accelerated with streamed dramas of diverse origins available in users’ preferred mode of AVT. The recent Netflix chart topping Korean drama Squid Game (2021) showed the extent of engagement with AVT by some viewers while confirming how easy it is for lay bilinguals to share their own AVT analysis often with their own translations. A barrage of viewer criticism on the quality of official translation via social media channels served to remind us of the risk of spreading a naïve view of translation (Orrego-Carmona 2021). This only seems to increase the inherent characteristic of subtitles as “vulnerable translation” (Díaz Cintas and Remael 2021). The improving quality of machine translation (MT) with machine learning available to commercial translation workflow further adds to the lack of trust in official translation. These factors contribute to the evidence of waning faith in professional translation. The cheaper, faster and more convenient alternative translation provided by MT questions the value added by the professional. The unfolding AI- and volunteer-friendly digital landscape demands new ways to demonstrate the added-value of professional human translation and to gain viewer trust. 

Given the rapid advances in AI with machine learning, the future of AVT faces ethical challenges; in relation first to the relentless applications of technology with translation recycled as data (Bowker 2020) and second to the de-schooling trend of tech-savvy empowered practitioners as “fan AVT” (Dwyer 2018).