Mixing human and nonhuman dance partners: contrapuntal translation and the shift from replacement to inclusivity

This paper calls into question the sociological paradigm of technological replacement as it relates to the use of NMT in the literary field. Latour (1988) calls this process a “translation”. His metaphor derives from the misconception that translation is inherently instrumental. It is unsurprising that current debates surrounding NMT are haunted by this socioeconomic spectre. The majority of NMT platforms are implicitly designed to, “cut out the middleman”. They are also invariably “domesticating”. Their designers want them to pass a Turing Test: producing simulacra of human output capable of convincing the general reader they were written by an accomplished native speaker. This is classic translatorial “invisibility”: an ideology that predominates in the industry’s methods of translation quality assessment. Anyone with a grounding in translation theory can pick out the false premise. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to literary translation, which is often seen in the industry as a hurdle in the quest for general AI. However, we suggest that literary translation professionals wishing to forestall the threat of NMT should avoid abstruse theoretical objections and promote the ethical case for socially inclusive practice. If NMT could be adapted to work polyphonically in collaboration with “bio-translator”’, throughout all project stages (inclusion), rather than submitting its products to post hoc (accessibility) checks, then it might become genuinely valuable in literary translation.