19 November 2021

Speaker: Dr Antonio Toral, University of Groningen

Title: Machine-Aided Literary Translation: State of Affairs in the Early 2020s

Abstract:

To what extent can machine translation be used to translate literary texts? Could such machine translations be of any use to professional literary translators? Could readers benefit in any way from the resulting machine-aided translations?

Through these and other related questions, I aim to present the current state of affairs concerning the application of machine translation to literary texts, focusing on fiction. Taking into account the shortcomings encountered to date, I will then outline potential lines of research that may occupy us in the first half of the 2020s.

Bio:

Antonio Toral is an Senior Lecturer in Language Technology at the University of Groningen. He holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Alicante and has carried out research in the area of Machine Translation (MT) since 2010. His research interests include the application of MT to literary texts, MT for under-resourced languages and the analysis of translations produced by machines and humans.