 I have the pleasure of introducing the introducer, who is Professor Sonia Colina, Professor here at University of Arizona of Spanish and Portuguese and Social Linguistics and translation studies. Excuse me, linguistics and translation studies. Thank you, Sonia. Thank you, David. Can you hear me? OK, am I? I don't know if this is sound OK. All right. I'll be brief since I'm just only the introducer. As you probably know, Anthony Pym works in sociological approaches to translation and intercultural relations. He holds a PhD in sociology from the school Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. He's professor, he's currently professor of translation and intercultural studies at Riviera and Virgilio University in Tarragona, Spain. And he's president of the European Society for Translation Studies, EST. He's also currently a visiting researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a fellow of the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies at Korea. And he's currently an extraordinary professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He has countless publications. I'm just going to mention a few of his many books and a few of his even more numerous articles. I've counted, I actually didn't count. I saw numbers upwards of 150 articles on his list of publications. In terms of books, he has a very recent publication, Exploring Translation Theories by Raleigh, that was published in 2011. Also, the move in text, Localization, Translation, and Distribution, published by Benjamin's in 2004. And a number of special issues in very prestigious, well- recognized journals. As for instance, in the translator, he has an issue, a special issue, edited volume, edited issue, I guess that should say. The Return to Ethics, published in 2001. Also, Negotiating the Frontier, Translators, and Intercultures in Hispanic History, also published by Saint Jerome, the publisher of the translator. A more edited volume, Social Cultural Aspects of Translator and Interpreting, published by Benjamin's in 2006. Beyond Descriptive, Translation Studies, Investigations and Amage to Gideon Turei, also by Benjamin's 2008. For those of you who are not specialists in translation studies per se, Descriptive, Translation Studies is a really important book in translation studies by Gideon Turei. And I think the first or second edition was published in 95. So then this is obviously an important reference to that book and an homage to Gideon. Professor Pym has also published in many prestigious journals in translation studies, such as META, META, The Translator, Target, and many others. And he's also on countless boards of translation studies journals. Fortunately, I don't think he is on the board of TS, which is the Translation and Interpreting Studies that the American Association for Translation and Interpretation publishes. He's not on that one yet, but it's a pretty new journal. But many, many, many of the others. He has many publications also on translator training, not just social cultural studies, but he also trains translators, as well as graduate students and translation researchers. So he's also done quite a bit of work on translator training. I remember this is a little bit more of my own interpretation in his own. He has impact on my work. I always remember his distinction between binary and non-binary errors in translation studies that has been mentioned quite a bit. And one thing that is not listed on his CV that I wanted to, I don't know about his CV, it's the publication or his website, that I wanted to mention before concluding here is that he was a CETRA professor in 1996. CETRA is the Center for Research and Translation Studies in Belgium and Catholic University and Movement in Belgium. And they've organized for a long time now a number of summer research institutes where they train graduate students. Well, he was the CETRA professor in 1996. When I was one of the students in the program, that was I just started as an assistant professor at Indiana University, so that was the first time I met him. So he was the CETRA professor at that time. Usually these institutes are always the research seminars always select some well-known influential translation scholar to lead to, I think it was two or three weeks, of classes, intensive classes. Something else which I find of interest, at least to us in Arizona, is that he published, this has been a while that he published a directory of translation and interpretation schools. I think he calls it Translated Training Observatory. This has been out there for a while and some of them were something that's old enough. It has a lot of entries that all the programs that are no longer there. The thing that I found that was really interesting about this is there are programs that are listed there and they're up to date. So it's for Arizona, that's pretty good. Anyway, so you probably all have read the abstract of his talks and people said they've also seen a little preview of his PowerPoint and it looks really interesting. So since that is the feeling that I get to from the abstract, I will not delay him any further and so I ask you to please join me and welcome in Professor Anthony Pym. Thank you, Sonia, special thanks of course to David and Chantel for the opportunity to attend such a stimulating conference. The strange thing is, if you've just heard, I've been working in a field, a discipline, an interdiscipline called translation studies, which in Europe is doing very well, thank you. We have our own conferences, our own journals, our own debates and it's not just in Europe, it's virtually worldwide except for the United States, which is interesting. It's not an established discipline here and I see my role as perhaps an ambassador in some sense or, well, first my role has been to learn from you. Because we are fairly well established outside of this country, I don't get invited very often to conferences where people are doing comparative literature, social linguistics, a bit of IT yesterday, second language acquisition. This has been a wonderfully stimulating mix for me. To the extent that I've been finding as others, that a lot of what I wanted to say has been said in much better ways from other disciplines. And so I'm not going to bother to repeat those insights. And that I've been struggling to put it together. And what I want to do here is very quickly situate where we are, try to put some things together that I think I can and then very quickly because we've gone past lunchtime, I think we will. I'll go as quickly as I can run through two perhaps newish additions to the menu, inculturation stolen from the Vatican, and some closing notes on the role of translation technology. That, however, is where we are. House Bill, I've got it here, 2281, which has been referred to but not seen. I found huge debate about this everywhere, debate and comedy as well. But I was surprised to get to the actual bill and see that it's really quite poetic in its ideological density in every sense of that word. You will notice the term individual appearing twice, individuals, okay? And some really quite reasonable things. Now, I would not expect the House Bill to support the overthrow of the United States government. You can have that one, okay? I don't think we should teach resentment toward a race or class of people, so we'll give you that one too, okay? A design primarily for students of a particular ethnic group will wait a minute. How does that follow from the others? What is the semantic connection here? What are the implicatures, if you like? And then advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals. We get the term individual returning. Now this, for somebody who lives in Europe, is wondrously strange. The term solidarity is obviously accumulates negative seems here. Solidarity for us is a positive thing. What happened? And solidarity is opposed to the individual, the liberalism that's being picked up in the idolatry based on the individual is very clear here. And it seems to divide the ideological options into two. One side, the individual as the basis of this particular democratic sovereignty. And the rest is a view of your polity as ethnic groups with their own solidarity and solidarity by definition leads to resentment, which by definition leads to, by definition by implication, overthrow of the United States government. Now, that ideological opposition is pretty easy to undo. And I think you guys here have had a pretty easy time of it because of the simplicity of the house bills and various government regulations that you're complaining about. Undoing the individual is what we go back to what Professor Pratt showed us, your sewers are genderless, situationalist, contextless communicators. These are, I suggest, your individuals. What's interesting to me is, well, one thing is a lot's been left out, but Derrida made the very simple point that that writing is left out of this. This is the original theory of the Gram. And that means that displacement in time and space is left out of this. And this means that the necessarily social nature of language as communication is left out of this. This is like the theological debates that used to happen about the perfect language, but then more than that, angels. Now, we knew that angels, un-galosses, messenger, angels bring messages to me of mortals, and that's fine. But what then do angels speak among themselves? Which language, and there are many theories of this in paradise, what is the language of, well, Hebrew, of course. No, not quite. It seemed to make more sense that angels don't have to communicate because they have perfect minds and can operate through telepathy, okay? Which is getting close to what's going on here, I think. And then the advanced theory on that is that after all, since nothing happens in paradise because it's all perfect, there's nothing to talk about, so there's really no need for communication at all. And these are your individuals in the liberal state who are in this perfect world of perfect communication are deprived of the sociability. That makes language what it is. Okay, I won't, there's a lot more to be said there, but, well, okay. I think that argument, I mean, that's an easy argument, that you can't just oppose the individual to a society of separate ethnic communities. But let's take the debate a bit more seriously and argue with somebody who's dealt with this seriously. Argue with Habermas, for example. If you want to pick an argument, Habermas in some key writings, basically between facts and norms, 1996, but also an article called Multiculturalism and the Liberal State does pick up this opposition between liberalism of the individual and what he calls communitarian positions. And does try to steer a course between them. In a way that's not easy to argue against or it's not as easy as it is to argue against the health spill that we just saw. It's particularly important, I think, when Habermas comes out with basic democratic ideals, such as the need for a legitimate polity to make it such that people understand themselves as the authors of the laws to which they are subject as adressees. Or in a different formulation, people feel themselves to be responsible for the interpretations of their rights. And Habermas uses these formulations to suggest that far from being a set of individuals, we need a sense of involvement in the polity and sense of co-responsibility. Yes, that's terribly idealistic, but when he picks up examples, ethical examples, it's intriguing. One of the main examples that American readers of Habermas might pick on is the Amish. The Amish who reclaim the right to restrict education to eight grades. You would eighth grade education and Habermas picks up the debate. Well, since we need people to be co-responsible for their laws in some way, we need the possibility of open public debate. We need communication. This is why communication of pragmatics is at the basis of Habermas's social modeling. And therefore we need that education to go beyond the eighth grade in order for people to have a degree of understanding and common points of reference to have a democracy. Habermas then goes on to pick up the bad evil nation-state that we've heard denigrated profusely over the past few days as the best available bet for defending our democratic rights. And I think before we write off the nation-state as a cause of all evil, and it's the Western nation-state, he makes no bones about that, we should at least come to terms with those possible advantages and with that idealism as something that we can work on to perfect. I won't deal too much on that, but the texts are there and I think there's a long philosophical debate there. Within the German context, what's interesting is that the people who oppose Habermas want more scope to cultural groups, want more recognition of cultural difference, but retain the state. They're looking for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state and one of the things, the terms they use is a translation sociology, translation sociology. The term translation comes in as this kind of midway term between everybody having the same language and thinking the same way in the same debate and then the translation comes in as the ways in which social groups within the state communicate with each other and interpret each other without assuming equivalence or perfect replication or indeed a common language. Do not confuse that with the French sociologie de la traduction, which is really actor network theory using the term translation however in very interesting ways within contemporary sociology. You'll see here that the kind of translation studies I do, training translators, thinking about the languages that we use, has been swept up into debates that are far more important than equivalence, serviceability, accuracy, the kinds of things that we were traditionally concerned with. That being swept up is not just a semantic accident so people stealing our term for new disciplines, stealing the term translation, it's also because if you look at the European as a multicultural multi-lingual state, entity, polity in which we would like this co-authorship to be operative, it's necessary, we think, to have translation. That is the term translation sociologie is not just a convenient metaphor for communication that may not be quite exact. In context, the use of translation, the institutional use of translation becomes one way in which we might perfect the polity. Is however, without understanding what people do with language and how translation relates to effect of multilingualism. When you get the oppositions, even the oppositions that Habermas uses and even the debates that come around the sociologie of translation, it's instructive to look at the way people actually use translation and to move away, and this is what I want to question here, to move away from that opposition which might be translation versus language learning. Professor Cameron picked up the debate that was in Britain where translation was demonized because it stopped immigrants from learning the languages. They must learn the languages, so do not translate for them. What a strange opposition if you think about it. Translation is the opposite of language learning. I'm very thankful to Professor Cameron. It occurred to me in a conference about five, six years ago in Nepal of all places, but Harold Summers, who's an MT guy, had this prototype MT program that can be used in medical encounters. So the doctor speaking English and the patient speaking Punjabi and basic medical encounters, restricted domain, limited number of things, pictures of human body. You can use machine translation and it's been done and done to work. It makes some sense. And I quite naively asked, and with this machine translation, can the Punjabi woman learn some English? As you use this machine, can you learn something of the language as well? I was shattered down by all my lefty British colleagues. How dare you insist that immigrants actually have to learn English? This was a crazy debate on left and right that I somehow walked into it. Now, thankfully, from Deborah Cameron's talk, I understand why I was in the middle of that. The debate is really not about that opposition, which I'll question more in a minute. It's about costs and the economics has been brought up. How much money is available for using translators and interpreters as an instrument of public policy? How much is available for language learning and how can we mix the two? Should we mix the two? Here is a very, very simple diagram. At the bottom axis, the horizontal axis, you've got time going on, okay? And this is a communication act. A communication act might be a short one, like here. It might be the immigrant family coming in and contemplating a period of 20 years, okay? And decisions are going to be made about language use in relation to time. It's fairly obvious that, gee, that's a bad diagram. Anyway, language learning costs are incredibly high at the beginning. It is hard to learn a language and you need time to do it. But you get better at it and the costs reduce over time and you won't get perfect, but you don't have to get perfect at the bottom. You just have to reach a point where you can get the visa to get into Germany or you can operate in the society or you can get there so that your kids can achieve some kind of success at school, I guess. Translation costs, which includes interpreting, however, do not diminish over time. Very simple truth, okay? It's by the page or by the hour. It goes down a bit because you get the terminology fixed up and you build up relationships of trust and you can then take some shortcuts, but in the long run, translation doesn't go down. Think about for each communication act or decision where you have the situation, where you have to make a decision, how long is this for? If it's for a conference, provide interpreting services, less resources. If it's for setting up a company in a foreign country, do some language learning. It's gonna be rationally. In actual practice, there's a lot of irrationality, but it's useful to get this sort of simple diagram to start thinking about the way the two can interact. And there's a point in the middle there, T1, and anywhere between T1 and T2 when you would want to mix up language learning and translation, roughly in the proportion of the two areas that are shaded there. This occurred to me when I was working for the Barcelona Olympiad prior to the Barcelona Olympic Games. And I was employed first as a translator there, then they figured out, hey, this is costing us a fortune. And then as well as translating, I was giving intensive language classes to the directors of the local Olympic Committee. Makes sense, four year period. An Olympiad is four years. You don't want to translate everything for four years. It's cheaper to do language learning and combine the two, okay? So I'm suggesting there's a sort of trade-off logic here and the key element is time, time for the investment of resources. What goes wrong is when people don't understand that and are too ambitious. The cost of translation services in the European Union is astronomical, although people from the DGT, sorry, the director at General Four Translation, fob it off on us with stories of, it's the cost of a coffee and a newspaper per citizen. Used to be a coffee, but now it's gone up to a coffee and a newspaper, okay? When you get the statistics and the statistics are publicly available and you get the number of pages which are translations and or corrections, copy editing, et cetera, of output and the total cost of translation services, each page is costing upwards of 180 euros, what do we say, $220 per page? Wait a minute, okay. There are some serious cost problems involved in the use of translation services as a constant activity and hey, isn't the European Union here for longer than four years? South Africa, where I've been visiting, I'd like to say doing research, but I will be doing some serious research there. South Africa for the defense of its 11 official language policy has resorted to many things, it's quite common to see classes conducted in two languages such as Professor Pratt showed us, you would see that, but with the professor changing between, in this case, Africans in English, Africans actually feels threatened in this case and there is a project there that they're developing to have simultaneous interpreting in the classroom. So the teacher will speak Africans and the students who need it, international students or students from other parts of South Africa can get that in English or in the other languages that are there. Now the problem with that is it's terribly expensive and it's okay if you're in a rich part of South Africa, but it's not going to work very well for the languages that need poor technologies with immediate ways of boosting the prestige of the non-English languages. I think is what was pointed out, the tendency is for speakers of non-English languages except Africans to port their students in schools that have English and so this wonderful overambitious policy to have 11 official languages is being undone by people's choices on the ground seeking a social mobility. One of the solutions is to have education, university education in two, three, 11 languages. Now my interest in that has been the fact that you can use translation simultaneous interpreting or translation more to the point and encourage language learning at the same time. The proposition that nobody's proved but somebody swore to me that this was true, when you have simultaneous interpreting you can still hear the other language so you will get incidental language learning. All right, I want to see if that's true. It's an interesting thing. But I know it happens with subtitles. So what I want to do is come in and say right, we'll calculate the cost for your simultaneous interpreter. Let me please do a recording of it. Let me please get some subtitles done by people who know the discipline and then we can put those subtitles into all the 11 languages very easily, very cheaply and we have a permanent record. People can use distance learning very easily and there is tons of incidental language learning because you've got the two channels there. You see what I mean? That language learning and translation need not be opposed and there are very creative ways of putting them together to save costs at the same time. Well, getting lost here. I promise somebody this but I'll go through quickly. What happens, however, is that in Spain first and more recently in the United Kingdom, people have looked at translation costs, particularly a cost of interpreting services to immigrant communities, said this is unacceptable and they have outsourced it to a private company that does things very cheaply or more cheaply than was the case in the government services in the Ministry of Justice. In Spain, this has led to some very colorful headlines. If you don't read the Spanish, okay, this is nothing particularly new, 40 police for corruption, but two interpreters arrested, one of them for selling information. All right. Actually use this in a lecture I give on visibility, on the translator's visibility and people argue we have to become more visible in society, we're getting it in Spain, we're becoming visible. This one, three police interpreters sentenced for falsifying national identity. Okay, you could believe that happening, it happens. This one, two sworn translators arrested for relations with money forgery. We hope they were getting paid very well. We hope they were getting paid with real money. Trial suspended because Chinese translator does not know Spanish or the Spanish was so bad, but this is my favorite of all time. I think I mentioned it, didn't I? Trial suspended, the only translator for Chinese was the accused, okay. Inadequate distribution of public resources, ladies and gentlemen. And this was the result of outsourcing in Spain. It's happening in Britain now. The interpreters in Britain are boycotting the private company. It's a huge debate going on and it's about this. It's about allocation of resources. It's about justice. What's interesting is that it's for immigrant communities who are not considered to be fully in the polity, even though European law does protect them and does accord them rights. Okay, so it's an economic debate. It's a situation calling for great creativity and creative solutions, I think, where researchers can play an active role. And it's about money. And it's about money as too. We shouldn't forget that, I think. This is from research I did years ago, but it's sort of going in the same direction. I was going through UNESCO statistics on translation flows between different languages. And I could prove, for example, that the very low rate of translations into English is two to four percent of books, the measuring books here. If you go into a bookshop in the United States, you get very few translations. A bookshop in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, 20 to 40 percent, you know, however. The smaller the culture, the smaller the book production in a space, the bigger the percentage of translations. So the low percentage in the United States was a fact of being big or producing a lot of books in the first place. But that's not what I'm interested in here. As I went through the data, I found statistics in the UNESCO Index Translationum of, what's it called? Sorry, books published in non-national languages. The United States didn't have a national language at that stage, so it's not there. English is actually not there. And I found an amazing correlation that countries that translate a lot also publish a lot in non-national languages. And I found this peculiar because it seemed there was a certain logic that says if you translate a lot, people will not need to read in foreign languages. And I'm finding quite the opposite. The case Sweden, Sweden publishes in English and German and translates a lot into Swedish. And you have a population that uses those languages. There's something like an underlying factor of cultural openness or disposition to dialogue beyond the nation state that is serviced by translation and by practical multilingualism in publishing. Now, the point that had been made before me and I don't have to repeat is that multilingualism takes many, many different forms. If you push language learning, you get the pigeons, creoles, code switching, code mixing, all sorts of language shifts that have been brought out. And if you push translation, you favor a more luxurious expensive solution for short-term mediation. But one need not contradict the other. And translation has traditionally been used as an instrument of language learning, just as a distribution of language learning in a given social group conditions who can operate as a translator and who needs to. The two logics go hand in hand. Good. I've been pursuing that sort of logic in historical terms. I did a book on the history of translators and what I was calling intercultures. Cultural groups who are professional mediators in Hispanic history. So I look particularly at Jewish intermediaries, the role of the church, Italians remarkably enough, we're just as suspicious as Jews in Spanish history as mediators. And the weight of that historical research has caused me, how long I got? Gee, it's gonna go very quickly, to change some very fundamental ideas about translation. We think that translation, I'm gonna get you to read that so I don't have to read it. That translation communicates a message from one language to another or one culture to another. And the more I've been looking at it historically, I find it's not the case. I find that what happens fits in far better with this model drawn from the Vatican, from John Paul II, this term inculturation. I find that what has been called here meaning creation practices are what are moved, transferred or spread out in an operation where one culture seeks to incorporate another into it but in so doing is changed. That might be the culture of Italian humanism. It might have been prior to that, the culture of Arabic proto-science in the 12th century into Spain. It's certainly the way the Catholic Church has seen itself operating and has been rewriting its own history, is it there? Seeing its own history as a process of incorporation of new cultures and changing of the culture that's doing the incorporating, this double movement of inculturation. Take your time, no rush, but they're getting hungry. Sorry. All right, I'll tell you the story. Okay, there I was, a calm translation theorist publishing books on language and things like that and somebody contacted me from a blog of American Catholics and they were very upset about the liturgy, about the mass that the Catholic American bishops had got together and revised the liturgy to put it into plain American with non-sexist pronouns and language that people could understand that was sent to the Vatican and came back with all sorts of corrections and the sexist pronouns put back in with theological justifications. You know, it's the mother church, therefore, okay, to go back to, where are we, the mother language, mother church, et cetera, yeah. And the debates then went into the website involved and looked around and the debates were about the age of what's called dynamic equivalents would be translation that adjust a lot to different cultural variables. That was sort of inscribed in the translation policy of Vatican II, okay, the directive is com le prévoir and very liberal, very adaptive, you know, we're going to make ourselves intelligible to other cultures. And that's the spirit in which this revision had been done and then over the years, the new directors have cut that down and said, hey, wait a minute, all this translating's going on and we can't control it because we don't read all these languages. So let's go back to the authentic, have I got it there? Yeah, the authentic liturgy when we will understand inculturation in a far more restrictive sense. That being that inculturation means you adapt to us and you will translate following the Latin texts that we have established, do not look at any languages anterior to Latin if people were asking Jesus spoke Latin, well, these guys do and they're controlling that. And your translation should be as literal as possible. That is, it's a factor trust and control, I think in the workflow. And I was asked as a translation theorist because they were saying, look, translation theory, translation studies has discredited dynamic equivalents, the work of Eugene Neider, if you know anything about the field, and it's very true that a lot of the prominent scholars that we've got, and in fact in my reply, I named Lawrence Fanuti and Gayatri Spivak because they're in the United States and the debate was in the United States, do in fact criticize dynamic equivalents, do support foreignization, to go back to Schleimacher's term, the translations that show the other language that are far more literalist to some degree or another. But then I tried to make the point that, wait a minute, these people, these translation theorists that would support foreignizing are not going to support the Vatican imposing its culture on all the other cultures of the world. And there's a huge ideological divide and you really haven't understood what we're doing in translation studies anyway, which for 20 years has been to reveal the diversity of actual translation practices on the ground. And to make the point that if you go into these cultures, you're going to first have to understand how they understand the notion of translation. What's been key to us has been the translatability of translation as a concept. And then if you don't get over that, you're not going to fare very well on the rest. Okay, anyway, that's how I got into inculturation and I started to look around at the century level of what is translated where. And it's become painfully obvious to me that the restrictive models, language A, language B, same level transfer, equivalents of some kind, just don't get it. Just don't explain what's happening. When you do IT into a language, into any of those languages in South Africa, you're not looking for the local equivalent for the term file in your software. You're producing a term. And you're producing lots of terms and you're producing ways of reading text. You're producing ways of using computers. You're transferring a computer culture from one to another. Actually, with quite little feedback if you look at it in terms of inculturation. And then I got around and I started to see, well, hey, I'm teaching in universities all over the world and they all look the same. And I can walk into a university in Japan and there are departments and there are deans. How did that get there? Through translations. But the purpose of the translations was not to communicate our meaning, it was to communicate our meaning production process. In that case, with all these institutions. And I can use the academy, Western University, basic ideologies or liberal humanism, if you want to give it a name. And I can see inculturation working for the dissemination, the growth, the spread of liberal humanism, just as well as it might work for the ideologies of the Catholic church. So I've started to change my thinking about what translation is, about what's moving, about how it's moving, it's not translation by itself, it's also translation with language learning. The church involves some language learning for the mass of Latin, which is not an entirely foreign language for the mass. That's the other thing. Somebody picked up my blog, my response here and said, PIM is using this term foreign all the time for the text we translate from. Hey, Latin is not foreign to the mass. I've, what? And they're quite right. I went back to stuff I did on Fendi secular modernism, translations of what's broadly called symbolism at the end of the 19th century. And I find, you know, French was not the foreign language. French was the language of that literary content. And people would translate from it, but after not, they would be reading in it, reading in the French. Along with the translations, as X is used to speak. Similarly, with the spread of IT, English is not the language you translate. From English is the language that travels with the translation act. You know, you've got programs, some of which, you know, the user interface might be localized, we say now, partially translated into Causa, but then the help files in English. Basic users, you've got translation, but if you're an advanced user, hey, come on, you know English. And the two are working together in the one act of inculturation. This has changed my view of translation, of what it's doing in the world. It's sort of made it rather pessimistic to me, because I see the relations of power, indeed dominating this. I haven't given up on the hope, the possibility of cooperation yet. People do come into this and agree to give up some rights in exchange for other benefits. Yes, we would like computers, we would like them entirely in our language, but if it could be partially localized, it'll work. So I don't share the entire pessimism there. Okay, but I've moved a long way from the previous situation. We're gonna jump over a lot of stuff. Finally, the role of technology. If I have any optimism at all, it's because of the way technologies are changing our concepts of translation and especially the sociological dimensions of who can translate. This is Facebook translation localization, okay? You know that Facebook was put into, I don't know, Spanish in three days and through what's called crowdsourcing. This is it working. I don't think you can read there, but the basic idea is that the users of Facebook, we put it into Catalan, for example, the users will propose translations. And then there's this forum that I've got here. Oh, this is, okay, this is going into Spanish. They've got to translate the phrase can't find who you're looking for, question mark. And we've got options proposed by various users. These are non-professional translators. You don't know about translation, may not know a lot of English, but they know about Facebook, because they're using it. No encuentres aquí en boscas, no encuentres aquí en estás buscando, no encuentres a la persona que estás buscando. All right, and you get these alternative translations and then they vote. Democratic translation. The polity is operative in this democracy and people become co-authors of their Facebook site language. Okay, this is crowdsourcing and this is what Facebook wanted to put a patent on actually unsuccessfully. And this is what many other companies are imitating. This realization that because of the electronic nature of communication, because of social networking, because of the desire for people to participate in this, we can get lots of very good translations done for free, yes. But people do it and they have fun doing it and they get to talk about translations while they're doing it. For many languages, we've done studies on Spanish in Argentina and on Turkish. You have free subtitling sites for films. We use this regularly, it's entirely illegal. People in this country are trying to put an end to it. But the crowdsourcing of subtitling has taken off enormously. People are doing subtitles into numerous languages for free and they enjoy doing it because it's a social activity and they're discussing it and talking about it and they can pick the film as they do their favorite film or TV series. The translating activity is being socialized by these technologies, especially by the reach of the internet. This meets machine translation. Not just any old machine translation, though. It meets statistical machine translation, data-based machine translation. What this means is, this is a Google translator toolkit it's a student translating, but I have my side, I've translated books on this. What happens is that your source text is on the left, it's divided into fragments, the chunking happens in the box on the right and you're given an automatic machine translation there which is determined according to statistical probabilities, has very few linguistic algorithms in it and we know it's not good. We know it's not perfect, fix it up. And the user is in fact not translating but preparing the bad translations. Now I don't know if you can see there, but what's also happening is that this is set up with a chat function and it's built for people to translate the text collectively. So you're talking about it with others and as soon as somebody else has translated the phrase that you're dealing with, their translation immediately comes up at the bottom. So you get not just the machine translation proposition but you get the repairs of that proposition done by anybody else working with you on it. When this came out, oh, two years ago, many people thought Google is gonna take over the translation memory business and they didn't. It was, this is built for translating websites, for translating Wikipedia. It's built for crowdsourcing for non-professional translation. Not the least because anything you put in becomes the property of Google. So you're not gonna put in any company secrets, you're not gonna do a lot of high cutting edge translations on this system because of the confidentiality issue. But in the realm of socialized translation, non-professionals having fun with languages and with their multilingualism, this is a huge step forward. When it doesn't work, it works, it doesn't work because people have not used it enough. The catch is the more you use it, the better it gets and the more you use it in a particular semantic field or field of activity, the better it gets there. It's this logic of cell phones. If there's only two of you, it's not much good, but the more people use it, the better it gets. It's a virtuous circle and this will change the face, I believe, of professional translation activity. There are other problems because there are people who don't understand that the empty output is therefore post-editing. Lots of websites are put up with just raw empty output. The Google crawlers pick that up and feed it back into the database, and so the virtuous circle becomes a vicious circle. And this is one of the important things that we have to work on at the moment. And it's an area where I think a bit of assiduous or astute training can do a lot of good, the training of people who are using these free technologies. Gee, it's lunchtime. The people who are envisaging how this is going to work in the future pay attention to the technologies available, but also the different professional roles available. I do train translators and I train them to use all the tools available just so they know what they are, know how it's happening. What's interesting for me in this particular diagram is that a text comes in, it's segmented, it's put into a translation memory, okay, which I haven't discussed, but you'll pick that up if you're interested, fed through machine translation, okay? And then it goes to what's written here as crowd translation. These would be the non-professionals. Typically people working for Greenpeace, working for people who are members of Greenpeace, Amnesty International to get some examples, but it could be a neo-Nazi party. There's no clean ideology here, but people who know what this text is about and they know the terminology of the field, even if their knowledge of the source language is not really good. They can do that first edit, which then goes to professional translators who will check it, who will look at it and work much faster because of it. A lot of the hard repetitive work, the banal stuff, has been done by the machine and by the non-professional area experts and our training needs in the future are going to be on that review or revision level of cleaning it up and then the engineering level of putting it back with whatever images or whatever format it needed or getting the website functional or integrating the video with the text. That sort of professional revision repackaging skills are what we're going to need training in, but increasingly I think this space of translation rather than become just an interface between cultures, just a border, a narrow border where one professional will control it, like the one anthropologist who goes out by him or herself to become the one cultural translator. The future is not that. It's going to become a very vital and active place in itself. Not just going to, it is becoming that. And that's the basis for my relative optimism about what can be the darker sides of inculturation. Thank you for your attendance.