Literary Translators on Technology: Navigating a New Professional Landscape

The talk will report the findings of a research study on literary translators’ perceptions of their role and their attitudes towards technology. Data were collected via means of a questionnaire administered to literary translators which adopted a socio-technological framework inspired by Pinch and Bijker’s 1984 Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model, according to which relevant social groups determine technological innovation. Results (1) show that there is an intersection between the way literary translators see themselves and they way they look at technology as related to their profession, and (2) suggest that literary translators are not averse to technology as such, and thus the adoption of a proactive and collaborative approach between different social groups could benefit the process of technological innovation in literary translation.

Paola Ruffo is a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University and her project focuses on literary translators and how they perceive themselves and technology in relation to their profession. She works as a freelance translator and has an MA in Translation and Literature from the University of Essex. She has taken part in several public engagement activities, and has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe with the show ‘Can Google Really Translate?’, based on her research project.