Over the past three years, universal peace and understanding have not broken out. Wars have intensified, polarisation has increased, different political and economic blocs face each other with ever greater hostility, and even in our private lives, we feel that resonance and encounter are on the retreat.
All of this is happening at the same time as “Artificial Intelligence,” a term used largely as a synonym for Large Language Models (LLMs) is supposedly boosting our ability to communicate and get on better. The language barrier is falling, we have been told.
This is based on the assumption that simply generating and deploying words will make you a more effective communicator across linguistic, economic, and social divides.
The reality is different: Generating text is not the same as having something to say, or cultivating your own voice, let along getting others to agree with you, buy from you, or engage with you in the longer term.
All of these ambitions are what translators enable, both within and between languages. Translators meet human needs, and human expressive and communicative needs are growing – in politics, business, and social life.
This is why the language industry is also growing, at rates that exceed those in most other industries. Slator, a think tank, estimates that, since 2023 along, the global addressable market for language services has grown by 10 per cent, to USD 31bn.
The roles that translators play in the world are getting more diverse, from qualitative market and audience research to language-focused technological consultancy. At the University of Bristol’s Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, we have expanded our curriculum to prepare students for the full scope of this work and to reflect on the human challenges involved in them.
The student feedback we received most often is that “this is amazing, and I had no idea translators could do all these things.” This feedback is not surprising. Translation has often been misrepresented in the public sphere, and translators, content with being recognised by their peers, have sometimes struggled to convey to people across industries the full breadth of the capabilities, values, and achievements.
We are now launching “is TRANSLATION,” a campaign to address these issues. It builds on the industry and teaching experience of staff in the department, interactions with students and the vast number of successful alumni/ae who have graduated from our MA programmes, and on our view that translation needs to be celebrated in its fullness.
We do this at the moment when we launch our new MA Translation and Intercultural Studies, which has this same ambition built into its curriculum: It allows students the choice between three pathways: Literary Translation, Media and Accessibility, and Technology and Society, as well as providing the option of an “open pathway,” where students are free to combine optional units to suit their specific interests.
The programme’s predecessor, the online MA Translation, was the first and, for a long time, the only UK-professionally accredited graduate programme in our field. We build on this history of cooperation between academia and professional organisations as we launch our new programme, and we would like to propose it as a case study in the interplay between student ambition, global needs, industry change, and academic strength.
We are available to engage with you on any of these issues, so do get in touch. I look forward to your message (christophe.fricker@bristol.ac.uk), as do colleagues across the department.