TALKS RundUmschau Translating Translators on Translation and Protecting Translators’ Intellectual Property
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Translating Translators on Translation and Protecting Translators’ Intellectual Property

Translated By

There is cheering news for translators working in any and all languages who write about the mysterious art, science and craft that is translation or who translate works about translation. The British publishing house Bloomsbury Publishing has launched a new series called Translated By which features writing by translators on translation. Bringing the Droste effect to translation, this series welcomes works about the practice of translation, the experience of translation or the history of translation regardless of source language(s) and is open to translators and scholars working in and between all languages—the only requirement is that their work must ultimately be translated into English. Volumes of essays on translation are also welcome.

The series editors are Regina Galasso (SP > EN) and Mario Pereira (POR > EN) and the advisory board includes translators working in Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Turkish, Guarani, French and English, among others. The first title, scheduled for June 2025, is Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir by Suzanne Jill Levine, a celebrated translator of Latin American fiction into English.

A few titles in this genre that I’ve long hoped to see translated into English and other languages are Esther Kinsky’s Fremdsprechen, Ilma Rakusa’s Mehr Meer, Corinne Gepner’s Traduire ou perdre pied, Claro’s Échec, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s Überqueren, überleben, übersetzen and Diane Meur’s Entre les rives. Another project on my wish list is a collection of translator’s forewords, afterwords, notes and introductions. Now is the time to take on that meta-translation project you’ve been dreaming of doing…

Created by Humans and the Authors Guild

Prompted by Nelia Vakhovska for thoughts on translators’ visibility, I recently wrote a short piece arguing that although #namethetranslator initiatives have brought some progress, we translators still have to insist that our work—our words—be recognized. In fact, in the age of AI it is more important than ever that readers of translations know they are reading mediated texts. Each translation is an act of interpretation—but who has interpreted and recreated it? Was it a human being? If yes, then who exactly has filtered the words on the page or screen through their minds and hearts? Or was it an algorithm that skews towards frequently used expressions and can’t (yet) reliably detect irony or metaphorical thinking? Who, ultimately, will vouch for the text since it is no longer, strictly speaking, in the author’s words?

Crucially, naming the translator is not merely a matter of giving credit where it is due, it is a question of intellectual honesty.

Nonetheless, a greater threat than disregard and intellectual dishonesty is becoming ever more prevalent: the predatory use of our words by AI companies. There have been several recent initiatives addressing this threat in the US and the UK.

First, the UK Society of Authors Advisory team has issued recommended AI wording to be included in all translator contracts.

The Publisher will not – without the Translator’s consent - use or grant others the right to use the Translator’s name, voice, likeness, or any other identifying data, nor any part of their [Translation/Contribution] in any manner which could help the machine-learning or training, development or operation of generative artificial intelligence technologies. 

The Publisher will not knowingly – without the Translator’s consent - use or allow the use of generative AI in association with the production of the Translation – for example for purposes of narrating, translating, images, cover design.

Second, a group of publishers, cultural institutions, writers’ unions and others have put out a statement warning of the threat AI training poses to the livelihoods of those make creative works:

The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.

As of 22 November 2024 it has garnered over 36,000 signatures, more than 250 from translators. You may want to add your signature.

Third, the US Authors Guild is partnering with the organization Created by Humans to protect and monetize authors’—and by extension translators’—works in AI development. CbH is a platform that will help ensure that authors can retain control of their copyrighted work through AI licensing. Most large language models (LLMs) have been trained on pirated texts without the consent of their creators. The CbH platform expects to be open for authors and publishers to register their texts and choices this fall and able to offer licenses to AI companies early next year. Writers and publishers around the world should monitor these developments and implement similar protections as soon as is feasible.

22.11.2024
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©Sarah Shatz

Tess Lewis is a translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jonas Lüscher, Lutz Seiler, Walter Benjamin, and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize fellow and an American Library in Paris Scholar of Note, she is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and co-curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English. www.tesslewis.org

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