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Influencers as Translators; Translators as Influencers
680 Sherbrooke St. West
Room 1041, Montreal, QC, H3A 2M7, CA
Join us at the Â鶹AV School of Continuing Studies on Thursday, September 26 for an engaging talk, “Influencers as Translators; Translators as Influencers,” where translation and social media studies scholar RenĂ©e Desjardins will explore the sometimes surprising (and potentially lucrative) links between AI-powered multilingual communication and the creator economy.
You will leave with a whole new way of thinking about translation as a major driver of official bilingualism and unofficial multilingualism in Canada, and translators as key actors rather than passive agents in the dynamics of multilingualism. It’s not your usual International Translation Day topic — nor do we want it to be!
Watch for more events throughout the coming academic year as we prepare to launch our brand-new M.Sc.(A) in Multilingual Digital Communication in the fall of 2025.
Happy International Translation Day!
*This event will be delivered in English, but participants can ask questions in English, French, and Spanish.
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a marked effect not only on the language industry, but in creative industries as well. From AI used to mimic voice actors in other languages (Weaver 2023), sometimes circumventing consent, to AI-generated music and social media content, translation is not the only profession or industry sector having to contend with the various variables and threats AI presents. In this sense, translators and creators/creatives find themselves in a similar situation: having to imagine what an AI future might look like, while advocating for the value-added of “human handprints” (Roose 2021; Kenny 2024).
Relatedly, for all the groans influencers and content creators may elicit (Lorenz 2023), the influencer and creator economies leverage translation and multilingual communication in a myriad of ways, leading me to argue that this is a market we ought to be taking seriously and one that would greatly benefit from professional multilingual consultancy. I also argue that this exchange could be mutually beneficial: as more language professionals are called to be in the social media eye, knowledge of the social media ecosystem is increasingly becoming a necessary competency. What, then, can we learn from one another? In this talk, I share examples from various recent projects, notably a SSHRC-funded research project on translation in the influencer and creator economies.
Selected References:
Kenny, D. (2024). Style in Human and Automatic Translation. Paper Presentation. TTR Turns 35 Conference. Montreal, Canada.
Lorenz, T. (2023). Extremely Online: the Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Simon and Schuster.
Roose, K. (2021). Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Random House.
Weaver, J. (2023, Dec. 24). Why the SAG-AFTRA contract might let AI kill voice acting. CBC. Accessed 22 July 2024.
About the Speaker
Renée Desjardins (pronouns: she/her) is an associate professor at the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg (Treaty 1), Canada. She is the author of Translation and Social Media: In Theory, in Training, and in Professional Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the co-editor of When Translation Goes Digital: Case Studies and Critical Reflections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She has been researching and writing about translation and social media for over a decade and has published on the subject in a number of other outlets, including The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics, and in a special issue of Translation Studies on “Social Translation”. Her most recent work, which has been funded institutionally and nationally (SSHRC Insight Grant 2022/2023 competition), examines translation in the creator, influencer, and gig economies.
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