Abstract
The last decade has witnessed the rapid development of machine translation. These striking innovations have been heralded by some as providing new ways for cultures and societies to communicate. Yet, many of these innovations have occurred primarily in an intertextual environment solely determined by humans and programs. The appearance of embodied thinking machines (ETMs) can increase the scope of interaction between linguistically and culturally diverse groups of people as well as machines themselves. This paper considers two aspects of incorporating ETMs within the translation process. The first focuses on training ETMs to be effective translators. Bodily gestures that are sometimes essential for adequate translation need to be learned. A scholar of gestures, Francois Caradec, has noted that there are no universal gestures – they can be culturally specific, and they can change over time. Teaching and learning these corporeal configurations hence are a challenge to advocates of gestural translation. particularly with respect to ETMs. The second focus, centering on the interpretive possibilities of ETMs, takes recent work by N. Katherine Hayles as its starting point. For ETMs to be effective translators, they must also be good interpreters. Extending Hayles’ views to ETMs, machines and humans, which are both capable of processing information, are part of a larger “semiosphere” and “cognisphere”. Hence Hayles opens the prospect that entities such as ETMs can be placed within the domain of agents (which she terms “cognitive assemblages”) that can make and presumably understand meaning, which in turn can lead to translation.
Presenters
David VampolaEmeritus Faculty, Computer Science Department/Cognitive Science Program, SUNY - Oswego, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus: Whose Intelligence? The Corporeality of Thinking Machines
KEYWORDS
Translation. Embodied Thinking Machines, Representations, Semiotics, Cognition
