Professor Michael Carl is Director of the Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology (CRITT) at Kent State University. He has studied Computational Linguistics and Communication Sciences in Berlin, Paris and Hong Kong and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University in Germany. He has worked and published for more than 25 years in the fields of on translation studies, machine translation and natural language processing. His current research interests lie in human translation processes and interactive machine translation.

Abstract

The relation between humans and machine translation (MT) enjoys a controversial status in Cognitive Translation Studies. While some authors maintain that translation technology plays a central, constitutive role in the translation process others reject the role of MT altogether. This talk will examine these differences in relation to humanistic vs. post-humanistic views and the location and conceptualization of meaning (Carl, 2022). Posthumanism suggests that Artificial Intelligence - and thus MT - does not need to imitate humans but provides a chance to open "ourselves to the nonhuman to learn from it” (Coeckelbergh, 2020, p. 43). It suggests human-machine collaboration can better achieve a set goal. Defenders of the humanistic, neoromantic and neo-enlightened positions may “find terribly unpalatable” that interactions with the environment have a constitutive role on our thinking and meaning construction. Posthumanism, in contrast, allows for the possibility that we may have “no guaranteed privileged access to deeper facts that fix the meanings of our thoughts, … [for] when more than one interpretation is well supported—there simply is no fact of the matter”, over which “we, the very thinkers of those thoughts, have no special authority” (Dennett 2013).

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