Chapter 2 Dutch Literary Translators Use And Perceived Usefulness Of Technology

Creative texts; translation technologies; machine translation; computer-aided translation; translation practice.

This collection surveys the state of the art of computer-assisted literary translation (CALT), making the case for its potential to enhance literary translation research and practice. The volume brings together early career and established scholars from around the world in countering prevailing notions around the challenges of effectively implementing contemporary CALT applications in literary translation practice which has traditionally followed the model of a single translator focused on a single work. The book begins by addressing key questions on the definition of literary translation, examining its sociological dimensions and individual translator perspective. Chapters explore the affordances of technological advancements and availability of new tools in such areas as post-edited machine translation (PEMT) in expanding the boundaries of what we think of when we think of literary translation, looking to examples from developments in co-translation, collaborative translation, crowd-sourced translation and fan translation. As the first book of its kind dedicated to the contribution CALT in its various forms can add to existing and future scholarship, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars in Translation Studies, especially those working in literary translation, machine translation and translation technologies.

This volume argues for an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and translation of literary style, based on a mutually supportive combination of traditional close reading and ‘distant’ reading, involving corpus-linguistic analysis and text-visualisation. The book contextualizes this approach within the broader story of the development of computer-assisted translation -- including machine translation and the use of CAT tools -- and elucidates the ways in which the approach can lead to better informed translations than those based on close reading alone. This study represents the first systematic attempt to use corpus linguistics and text-visualisation in the process of translating individual literary texts, as opposed to comparing and analysing already published originals and their translations. Using the case study of his translation into English of Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti’s 1965 novel Gracías por el Fuego, Youdale showcases how a close and distant reading approach (CDR) enhances the translator’s ability to detect and measure a variety of stylistic features, ranging from sentence length and structure to lexical richness and repetition, both in the source text and in their own draft translation, thus assisting them with the task of revision. The book reflects on the benefits and limitations of a CDR approach, its scalability and broader applicability in translation studies and related disciplines, making this key reading for translators, postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of literary translation, corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics and narratology.

This book provides a wide-ranging overview of Dutch technological leadership in the early modern Europe, it explains whence this leadership came about and why it ended and it explores to what extent the Dutch case illuminates the evolution of technological leadership in general.