Digitalisation, neo-Taylorism and translation in the 2020s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper aims to provide a cursory yet critical overview of digital transcultural communication in the third decade of the new millennium. Today, digital entrepreneurs create lucrative business models based on user data whilst simultaneously enticing individuals to get used to working with these digital models. We will relate these two commercial objectives to modern translation practices, interweaving our discussion with the growing debate on the computer-assisted exploitation of the workforce. Digital neo-Taylorism is especially rife in the global translation industry, which today is overwhelmingly located on globally interconnected virtual online platforms, where largely underpaid professionals tend to be exploited by means of non-creative yet laborious post editing tasks or crowdsourcing translation activities. By linking the three values speed, efficiency and quantity to neural machine translation, postediting translation and crowdsourcing translation, we embark on a cursory critical discourse analysis, partly to show digital neo-Taylorism at work in the language used to describe new digital translation processes. In doing so, we endeavour to account for the underlying sociotechnical relationships across wider systemic processes such as digitalisation, alienation and capitalist social relations, and their effects on language and translation professionals.