earticle

영어

During the last decades of the 21st century, the increasing discussions about technological advancement, machine learning, artificial intelligence and post-humanism have triggered new areas of research for translation. So to speak, the nature of Translation Studies, as a multidisciplinary field, smooths its path to adapt to the new technological conditions, especially by engaging with issues pertaining to automatic translation and the tools it offers to provide accurate renditions, and therefore perform the same, if not better, role of the human translator. Such a speculation is mostly based on the predominant traditional thinking of translation as the condition that presupposes an inter-lingual transfer of some inherent qualities of the source text. Obviously, there is more to translation than to simply redirect the attention of both the human and machine translator to look as faithfully as possible for the closest match, equivalence or equivalent effect in the target language and culture. Translation is beyond transfer and reproduction; it is intrinsically grounded at the very heart of Hermeneutics, as there will be no translation without hermeneutic understanding/interpretation: an understanding that is explicitly guided by the subjectivity of the translator and his own experiences in his own world. Therefore, the present paper attempts to negotiate the new aesthetics of automatic translation, partly by arguing that machine translation can never account for the problematic that arises as a result of translating, say, religious and literary texts that are always amenable to be interpreted anew. The human translator is the only agent who is able to perform the task of translating texts that are open to different yet conflicting interpretations. To verify this assumption, the paper draws on the problem of (un)translating the Quran, as a religious script, into English. The case of the Quran shows that translation is, par excellence, a matter of human interpretation that is beyond the grasp of machine translation programs.