There is growing interest in the use of machine translation (MT) in literary translation. While much research in this area has been concerned with productivity and machine translation quality, there has been relatively little research to date that focuses on the interaction of literary translators with machine translation. In today’s seminar, I will present part of an ongoing project (with Dorothy Kenny, Dublin City University) that investigates the use of a machine translation system by the highly experienced and prize-winning English-to-German literary translator Hans-Christian Oeser. It focuses on his experience as he post-edits literary texts, how post-edited outputs differ systematically from his translation work from scratch and how the translator’s style is affected by his use of machine translation.
Bio
Marion Winters is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, where she teaches translation technology, theory and practice. Her main research interests lie in the areas of corpus-based approaches to translator style, translation and autobiography, and more recently how the use of machine translation might affect literary translators.