Abstract
Using translation to illustrate and justify some of the changes we are facing today, I will follow a three-step move: - What are the biases towards purely technological interpretations of the “medium”? Technology is changing our perception of time and space; in particular, the power of instant seems to override any other feelings of long-term perspective and continuity. - Crowd is also changing, from the lonely crowd to the crowdsourcing: it takes nowadays the public sphere in different ways. This metamorphosis can be traced in translation: for a long time, translation has been denied as a need, an effort, a profession, a discipline. Today, because of the new work environment, translation becomes a desire, more easily accessible and practised by non-professionals. The evolution is technical, economic and social. It is also textual. - An historical overview sheds light on the impact of media technology in translation. In fact, certain concepts are under the influence of the materiality of the work. Among those concepts, “text” draws our attention: it has often been characterised by only linguistic features; today, it intertwines quite a number of different types of signs. The multimodal text challenges certain current concepts of Translation Studies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.27.13739
Highlights
Messianism appears to be inherent to the history of the prophets of communication
We may speak of globalization in different senses, in particular as a network woven by information and communication technology (ICT), facilitating the interplay between global and local, and with implications for the organization of work, community life, production, distribution, transportation, product-protection, services, information, documents
Denial has likewise been present with regard to translation as a profession, notably by translators themselves who have integrated, incorporated, and internalized various aspects of the “subaltern” in their work, caught between the sacrificial idealism and the calculating materialism of their activity, all the while taking on the labor and servility of their always precarious “vocation” as if this job or this practice required a certain predisposition towards effacement and docility (Kalinowski, 2002; Simeoni, 1998; Buzelin, 2014), even self-destruction
Summary
Messianism appears to be inherent to the history of the prophets of communication. Each successive step in our mastery of time and space has seen a revamping of the promise of a society whose members would be more mutually supportive, that would be more transparent, freer, more egalitarian, and more prosperous. The end of the twentieth century did not eschew this spirit of messianism Today, it is true, information and communication technology (ICT) is so omnipresent and so invisible (except when it breaks down) that we almost forget its effects. We may speak of globalization in different senses, in particular as a network woven by ICT, facilitating the interplay between global and local, and with implications for the organization of work, community life, production, distribution, transportation, product-protection, services, information, documents In this evolutionary process, geographical space would extend to the whole planet, time would shrink to the last stock market session, to the instantaneity of the click of the mouse or button of a mobile telephone. The denial of translation and of translators has taken on many diverse forms and has lasted for centuries, but, secondly, it has been jolted for almost three decades by the new work environment
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