Schöne neue Übersetzerwelt? Chancen und Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung für Translatoren

Abstract

Brave New World of Translators? Opportunities and Challenges of Digitalisation for Translators

For Knowledge societies, it is of paramount importance to develop skills so that this knowledge can be identified, transformed, disseminated, used and applied. A new configuration of knowledge through the development of meta resources can be used to promote new forms of collaboration and cooperation, which are increasingly taking place in the digital environment. Three driving forces are causing this shift. First, the shift away from labour and capital-intensive activities towards activities where information and technical knowledge or expertise are in the foreground. Second, globalization is a significant driving force since globalization and digitization are closely interlinked. Third, Information communication technologies enable the processing and analysis of large amounts of data, which have greatly reduced transaction costs for cooperation and interaction. We can, therefore, speak of a new world of digital translators. The paper at hand deals with the effects digitalisation has had on business translation and the role of the translators. It shows that while computer-assisted tools might on the one hand be indeed helpful for translators and increase speed and productivity, on the other hand they tend to contribute to dumping prices and convey the impression that translation is a fairly easy task which can be accomplished by almost everyone with the help of CATs and assign translators the mere role of post-editors, even if this can mean that there is hardly any readable machine translation has to be translated almost entirely from scratch. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how digitalisation and globalisation impinge on the translator business and lead to the thriving of scammers and frauds. Due to the now quite efficient machine translation freely available translations by amateurs and the impression that TM systems are able to do the majority of the translation work, translation runs the risk of being perceived as a digital good, as something cheap, simple and fast for which basically no well-paid experts are needed. Realistically, therefore, there can be no talk of a brave new world of translators in the digital sphere. Apart from that, professional associations and the few 49 translation agencies that also care about translators should think about how to deal more effectively with the numerous grievances in the digital world, from poor pay to fraud