On the Translation of Literature as a Human Activity par Excellence

Abstract

The quality of state-of-the-art machine translation systems have prompted a number of scholars to tap into the readiness of such systems for “literary” translation. However, studies on literary machine translation have not overtly stated what they consider as literature and mistakenly assume that literary translation is a matter of transferring meaning and/or form from one language into another. By approaching literature as art and literary translation as an artistic work of re-creation, we counterpoint, in this article, the notion that literary machine translation can be seen as an indisputable evolution within translation technology. Ethical concerns may well be utilitarian in studies to date, but by advocating for a deontological approach, we consider that aesthetical value, cultural mediation (which includes the use of paratexts), and authorship of literary translation (should) rank higher in our ethical assessments of the feasibility and actual contributions of literary machine translation.