METM26 keynote

Algorithms of interpretation: redefining translation in a machine age

Lawrence Venuti, New York, USA

Machine translation has improved to such an extent that a time can be predicted when most, if not all, translation will be performed by machine. Both translators and translation studies scholars have reacted to this development with questionable thinking about translation as well as human creativity.

I will first look at definitions of creative translation, which generally assume an instrumentalist model: translation understood as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant—a fixed form, meaning or effect in the source text. Sometimes the invariant is taken to be the "voice" of the source-text author or the translator. But this model actually limits the translator’s creativity, because it constitutes an impoverished conception of what translation is and how it might be appreciated.

Enter technological progress, which has enabled machines to attain a basic translational competence. I will explain how these machines can foreground the hermeneutic function of human translators—but only if we assume a hermeneutic model where translation is understood as the inscription of an interpretation which inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture.

Finally, harnessing the machine through computational text analysis and large language models to serve the translator’s interpretative act can redefine translation by foregrounding the tasks that make it at once scholarly and creative. The idea I will convey at METM26 is that we can make our voices heard by constructing a collaboration with the machine that redefines and enlarges the scope of involvement for the human translator, increasing its learning and sophistication.

About Lawrence

Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan.

He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995; 2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013), and Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019). He has also edited Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), The Translation Studies Reader (5th ed., 2026), and Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2017).

His translations include, most recently, Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold (2023) and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (2025).