The Event/Machine of Neural Machine Translation?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present paper purports to question the status of machine translation as a technique, or even as a technology. The use of new technologies, and more particularly neural machine translation is problematic, because the operating mode of machine translation software is a machinic language processing that relies on the harvesting of potentially infinite databases to feed an artificial intelligence. Such a recursive loop only reinforces the sphere of the same without ever taking into account the risk of radical otherness in all its singularity. This is the spawn of our collective intelligence fed back to us by a network of interconnected algorithms in an endless feedback loop. I contend that translation allows us to overcome the dichotomy between techne and poiesis by opening the space for the emergence of otherness in the translating language that welcomes it. Even though the automaticity of the machine is antinomic with any poetic event, (how) can we, as Derrida puts it, “think together the machine and the event, a machinelike repetition and that which happens/arrives” 1 through (machine) translation?