Translalia: Translation in Dialogue with AI

Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased, error-prone, and bad for the environment; they reinforce the dominance of English and generate large amounts of terrible writing; and they are associated with a simplistic, functional conception of translation. But they can also represent language variety in unprecedentedly fluid ways, and enable new kinds of translational creativity. We are developing an app, Translalia, to support this sort of translational interaction with LLMs. Join us to try it out, share your views, and more generally explore how AI might change translation for the better as well as the worse. Please bring a laptop and a short text you'd like to work with.

Professor Matthew Reynolds is interested in how literature germinates between and crosses languages; in translation as a creative process, especially as it involves Italian, French, the classics and the many languages of English; in comparative and world literature; in visual art; in writing fiction. He is most at home in the 19th & 20th & 21st centuries but his work has ranged back as far as the early modern period. His current research develops the concept of Prismatic Translation, looking at the power of translation to multiply and regenerate texts in different times and places. There is a book, , and a website, , which offer interactive maps and visualisations of the phenomenon of Charlotte Brontë’s novel as it has been translated more than 500 times into more than 50 languages. Like much of Matthew’s recent work, this project involves collaboration with many people, and is housed in the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre, which Matthew founded and chairs.

Dr Joseph Hankinson studied English at Balliol College, completing his DPhil in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Matthew Reynolds. His research connects the writing of the long nineteenth century to its global contexts, both in terms of the influence of specifically tropical regions and people on nineteenth-century literature, and in terms of that literature's global afterlives.

His first book, Relational Worlds: Kojo Laing, Robert Browning, and Affiliative Literature (2023), exemplified these interests by tracing vital affiliations between nineteenth-century British poetry and its (broadly-conceived) tropical reception. It has been reviewed in Victorian Poetry and in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He has published widely on relations between tropical and non-tropical imaginative worlds, as well as on the cross-temporal imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, with articles appearing and forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, Style, Essays in Criticism, Mosaic, Journal of Cultural Research, and elsewhere.

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