Event Details

Experimental Translation talk and workshop

Experimental Translation: Globetranslation

Dr. Lily Robert-Foley (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III)

Experimental Translation: the work of translation in the age of Algorithmic Production posits that the threat of machine translation has given way to an alternative, experimental practice of translation that reflects upon and hijacks traditional paradigms. In much the same way that photography initiated a break in artistic practices with the threat of an absolute fidelity to the real, machine translation has paradoxically liberated human translators to err, to diverge, to tamper with the original, blurring creation and imitation with cyborg collage and appropriation.

This shift has also inspired a shift in methodology, and the Experimental Translation monograph is accompanied by a handbook of experimental, creative-critical (to employ the term used in Delphine Grass’s 2023, Translation as Creative-Critical Practice) “translation procedures” to try at home or abroad, in the classroom, the laboratory, the garden, the dance hall, the city, the kitchen, the library, the shopping center, the supermarket, the train, the bus, the airplane, the post office, on the radio, on your phone, on your computer, and on the internet.

In this talk and workshop, I would like to practice with participants a procedure that did not find its way into the handbook: globetranslation. Globetranslation consists in selecting a single word, translating that word into as many languages as possible, searching for those translated words in unilingual dictionaries in that word’s own language and then using machine translation to translate those definitions back into English. This procedure adopts the conceptual writing technique of appropriation (Acker, Place, Dworkin, Goldsmith) as a way of doing terminological research across languages. Time and desire permitting, this procedure may even take us further, to individual and collective poetic creation and discussions about the politics of appropriation and language learning.

Bio:

Lily Robert-Foleyis Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. She is the author of Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production (forthcoming from Goldsmiths Press 2024). She is also the author of four books of poetry including m, a book of poetry-critique-collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), graphemachine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013), Jiji, a novel in prose poems and conceptual writing (Omnia Vanitas Press, 2016),and The Duty to Presence, a book of poetic autotheory, forthcoming from the To collection of the Presses Universitaires de Rouen, along with its translation by Anne-Laure Tissut. She has translated two books of poetry, by Claude Ber and Sophie Loizeau, and she is a member of the Outranspo, an international group of experimental translators.