Translating the unknown : a case study on the usefulness of machine translation in comparative literature research

Abstract

Despite the uneasiness with which the discipline of comparative literature (CL) long regarded translation, at least until the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies (TS) in the last decades of the twentieth century (Bassnett 1993; Lefevere 1995; Apter 2006; D’hulst 2007; Tee 2012; Ning and Domínguez 2016), new areas of research in the latter field of study have provided CL with interesting tools that are being increasingly tested, evaluated and used in contemporary scholarship. Apart from translation theory, which, since Walter Benjamin, has increased its relevance within CL (see Apter 2006), the sub-discipline of computer aided literary translation (CALT), together with the emergence of the digital humanities, has introduced technology as a potentially useful tool in comparative literary research. CL researchers who deal with non-canonical works may find themselves in a position where their studies are limited by language barriers. Some minor texts, which may be of interest within a wider research topic, may never have been translated, thus rendering it impossible for the researcher to access them without human or technological assistance. Since a fully fledged, publishable translation by a competent literary translator may be expensive and possibly unnecessary for the scope of a research project, machine translation (MT) can prove to be a useful tool. This chapter investigates the extent to which MT may come to a CL researcher’s aid in accessing untranslated literary works for specific types of analysis. It limits itself to the genre of historical drama and derives the data for its conclusions from a case study conducted on the German nineteenth-century tragedy Marino Faliero by Heinrich Kruse (1876). The text was machine translated, post-edited by the researcher and reviewed by a professional German linguist to obtain an adequate translation in English for CL research purposes.