Literary translation has often been regarded as constituting a domain of multivalent human creativity, a bastion of humanistic learning, besieged in our technological era by computer-assisted translation, automatic translators and information technologies in general. At the same time, the idea of training human beings to perform such tasks – that is, of actually contributing to the enhancement of practical expertise in matters of literary translation – tends to be met with some scepticism, even among some translation studies scholars, who have rather turned away from the process of translating literature to the description and sociological analysis of its end results.
Literary translation, it is argued, entails something like the private exchange of personal idioms, and should be left in the hands of competent craftsmen and craftswomen open to just such a private calling. Though this picture may describe some of the transactions that occur under the heading of literary translation, it by no means applies to all, or even most, of these. More frequently, we encounter literary translators working within identifiable institutional contexts, collaborating with editors and perhaps even other translators, and often specializing in specific literary genres or sub-genres. Nor is there any reason why computer-assisted translation tools, such as concordances, terminology databases or translation memory managers should be left out of the teaching of literary translation, if at least most translation course curricula grant that such teaching is indeed desirable. Moreover, if we assume that literary translation is one of the most complex problem-solving human activities, it seems that pedagogical approaches would benefit not only from the availability of wide and differentiated databases, but also from the collective engagement of groups in assessing the relevance of such output for their own translation tasks, the results of which could then be extended to larger audiences via on‑line platforms and discussion forums.
It is with this specific context in mind that we propose to analyze three distinct initiatives, each collaborative in nature and each making use of information technologies to further their aims: a classroom blog for the study of literary translation, a database of literary translation problems involving exchanges between English and Portuguese, and an on-line poetry translation workshop. Two aims that cut across all three of these initiatives are the assessment of the possibilities for collaborative translation – the extent to which the process of translation can be shared and transmitted horizontally – and the discovery of ways for extending and sharing outcomes both inter‑institutionally and beyond an academic context. In examining these initiatives, we will attempt to lay out their strengths and weaknesses, considered in terms of the work they have produced to date and in light of their exploration of the informational technologies available to them. Ultimately, the goal of such a critical examination will be to assess the possibilities for a more ambitious effort at project building in translation and editing, through a collaborative online platform with participants from different institutions and courses of literary translation training and eventually reaching out to all those interested in the web community.
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