Pym on Translation History
Anthony Pym argued that translation history is not a chronology of texts but a study of the people who produced them and the intercultural spaces in which they worked.
Four principles
- Translation history should explain why translations were made, not only list them.
- The object of study is the translator, who is a person, not the abstract translation.
- Translators worked in intercultures (overlapping zones), not between sealed cultures.
- Translation history exists to address the present, not only to record the past.
What this means for AI
An AI translation service inherits a history. Its training data, the languages it serves well, the defaults it ships with, all came from human translators working in specific intercultures. Naming that history honestly is preferable to pretending the tool sprang into being neutrally.
Further reading: Cronin, Niranjana.