L’article suivant (« Are Translators Luddites? ») est écrit par John Milan john@gypsytranslations.com;, traducteur portuguais/espagnol – anglais, certifié par l’American Translators Association. M. Milan nous a donné son consentement pour publier son article.
Notre collaboratrice fidèle, Françoise Pinteaux-Jones, a bien voulu traduire le préambule en français.
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One night, in 1811, a group of men from a village just north of Nottingham, England, gathered outside of a shop and made a collective decision: they were going to destroy the machines that were threatening their livelihood and way of life. As they burst into a room filled with a half dozen weaving machines, they imagined a future in which their actions might be the first step in turning the tide against a rising industrial revolution. They smashed the equipment. Then they ran off into the night, pleased with their deed, and emboldened by the thought that if enough people reacted in a similar way, these devices might be put into its proper place: subservient to men, rather than supplanting them.
The group claimed inspiration from a man they called “Captain Ludd” or “King Ludd” – a reference to Ned Ludd, a weaver from the region who had allegedly stood up to mistreatment a few decades earlier by destroying a pair of knitting frames. Their movement, though apolitical and at times disorganized, became known as the Luddites. For years they managed to wreak havoc throughout England. Their stated objective was to prevent “all machinery hurtful to commonality”, which meant, as a group of Luddites explained in a letter in 1812, not all machines or all technology; only that which could do harm to the common good.
They lived in a time of great social upheaval and economic distress. Their movement was about much more than technology, one of many factors enabling a revolution that was changing traditional ways of life and creating societal gaps. It was about growing inequality, poor working conditions, and the belief that their world was changing for the worse. But at the same time, technology was the most tangible of these factors, and as such, one that the average man could directly attack and hope to affect to some measure.
Fast forward to 2011. This “Luddite Bicentennial” seems a good opportunity for language-service professionals in general – and translators in particular – to pause and to take stock of their own modern technological reality. This is likewise a time of upheaval, with advances in artificial intelligence, software, and means of communication that threaten the way in which language services have been, and are being, rendered.
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Le groupe d’hommes d’un village voisin de Nottingham, Angleterre, qui s’étaient retrouvés, cette nuit de 1811, aux abords d’un atelier prit la décision collective de détruire les machines qui menaçaient leur subsistance et leur mode de vie. Tandis qu’ils se précipitaient dans la pièce occupée par une demi-douzaine de métiers à tisser, ils imaginaient un avenir dans lequel leur action pourrait être le premier pas d’une marche-arrière de la révolution industrielle. Ils brisèrent le matériel puis disparurent dans la nuit, contents de leur haut-fait et excités à la pensée que si assez de gens réagissaient comme eux, ces mécaniques pourraient être remises à leur place : au service de l’homme plutôt qu’à son remplacement.
Le groupe tirait son inspiration d’un homme qu’ils appelaient le « Capitaine Ludd » ou « le roi Ludd » – une référence à Ned Ludd, un tisserand de la région qui avait, disait-on, bravé les mauvais traitements, quelques décades plus tôt pour avoir détruit une paire de tricoteuses (mécaniques s’entend). Leur mouvement, bien qu’apolitique et parfois désorganisé, se ferait un nom, celui de luddite. Pendant des années ils réussirent à causer des dégâts dans toute l’Angleterre. Ils se donnaient pour but d’empêcher « toute machinerie préjudiciable au bien commun », ce qui signifiait, comme l’expliquait dans une lettre de 1812 un groupe de luddites, non pas toutes les machines ou toute la technique ; seulement ce qui nuirait au bien commun.
Ils vivaient une époque de bouleversement social et de détresse économique considérables. Leur mouvement avait d’autres visées que le progrès technique, un parmi tant d’autres facteurs porteurs d’une révolution qui changeait les modes de vie traditionnels et creusait les écarts dans la société. Il se souciait de l’inégalité croissante, des mauvaises conditions de travail et avait le sens que leur monde allait de mal en pis. Il n’en restait pas moins que le progrès technique était le plus tangible de ces facteurs et en tant que tel, celui auquel l’individu moyen pouvait s’attaquer directement avec l’espoir d’influer dessus, au moins un peu.
Sautons deux siècles pour rejoindre 2011. Le bicentenaire du luddisme semble le moment opportun, pour les professionnels de la langue en général – et les traducteurs en particulier – de faire le point sur les réalités de leur propre modernité technologique. L’heure est aussi au bouleversement avec les progrès de l’intelligence artificielle, des logiciels et de moyens de communication qui menacent la façon dont les services linguistiques furent et sont encore rendus
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Suite de l'article en anglais
New technologies seem to appear every day, such as the telephone software system that interprets in real time, or the application that can be downloaded onto a smart phone and uses the phone’s camera to provide a rough translation of simple text almost instantaneously. And of course, there is Google Translate, a free online service with enough capital and intellectual power behind it to make even the most stalwart of translators tremble.
Translation and interpreting are among the world’s oldest professions. They have been conducted in a fashion that varied little from generation to generation. From the solitary scribe toiling away over barely legible sacred texts to the bilingual envoy charged with delivering news that might very well result in his own demise, skilled polyglots were a limited bunch whose ability to do their job depended upon studying, memorizing, and faithfully reproducing communications among distinct groups. Yet now, with a few keystrokes on a laptop, or a camera phone with the right application, translation and interpreting are truly at the fingertips
of the masses. No longer must the monolingual wonder in a mixture of fear, distrust, and amazement about what “foreigners” are saying or thinking. With the technology now at their disposal, people are able to read and to hear and to gain a basic understanding of what is being said and written in another language. This is a major breakthrough.
For those in language services, it is an essential point to keep in mind, because while rightfully concerned about quality and accuracy, translators and interpreters are not terribly representative of the population at large. They may quibble over the right word, tone, or register, but these are the details, the trees in the forest, and not the larger communication picture. Despite their best intentions, “good enough” translations may often be just that: good enough for the purposes in question3. Far from perfect, with mistakes here and there, but they get the job done. Which raises the question: What, if anything, should translators and interpreters do?
Like the Luddites of the early 19th century, today’s language professionals face forces beyond their control, and with certain technologies, beyond their comprehension. Translation and interpreting technology is a small part of a much larger revolution in the way in which people communicate, do business, and interact on a global scale. It provides a means to an end: to understand what is going on in another part of the world, or to communicate with someone when a common language is not shared. This technology exists because it solves a problem in a useful way. Most people do not competently speak multiple languages and may not have the means, desire, or wherewithal to develop these skills. Thus, it is much easier for them to rely on imperfect technological solutions, which will continue to be developed and to improve. As more people become aware of and familiar with these technologies, they will adopt them and begin using them in novel ways, not just for chatting online or understanding a menu while on vacation, but eventually to make legal decisions and to conduct business.
This reality is quickly approaching, and language-service professionals need to prepare. How will they face this future? Will they recognize that technology has indeed changed the industry, and they will have to adapt their business models accordingly? Or will they seek to organize in the night and make plans to break the machines of the 21st century? There are, of course, plenty of possibilities in between; but the point is – the future for language services is now; and the sooner this future is embraced, the sooner translators and interpreters will be able to determine their roles in it.
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Définition du Luddisme du "Lexique d'Histoire et de Civilisation Britanniques"
(Philippe CHASSAIGNE, édition ellipses) :
Mouvement d'hostilité au machinisme, particulièrement actif dans le sud du Yorkshire entre 1811 et 1816. Il se caractérisait par des émeutes d’ouvriers, brisant les machines (surtout des métiers à tisser) qu’ils rendaient responsables du chômage. Leur meneur était un dénommé Ned Ludd, personnage probablement plus mythique que réel, qui aurait installe ses quartiers dans la forêt de Sherwood. Il y eut deux principaux accès de fièvre luddiste, en 1811-1813 (crise due au Blocus continental) et en 1816 (passage difficile a l’économie de paix après les French Wars.)
Comments
3 responses to “Des traducteurs sont-ils des luddistes ?”
Let’s shift to some first-class translation, adaptation, localization, post-editing, comparative copy editing.
Complément à mon commentaire, Paul Sulzberger propose un système comparatif ou de classification par attribution d’étoiles aux traductions automatisées et aux traductions humaines. Source : Paul Sulzberger, The Translation Business, http://tinyurl.com/3l2rf2d (Accès : 2 sept. 2011)
This is a very interesting concept, Martin. Thank you for that reference, which I recommend to all free-lance translators and others engaged in translating.