ABSTRACT
How might new and emerging computational methods and interfaces transform the processes of translating sacred texts? How might we host an experience ‘on the face of the deep,’ involving users in those processes, opening up creative, interactive, meaning-making possibilities? Such interests fly in the face of commercial machine translation, which aims to make translation immediate and invisible, foreclosing access to the processes and ambiguities of translation. How might we engage these tools perversely, against their market interests, to slow down and make visible the processes of translation? Toward that end, I offer three design cues: first, drawing from Levinas, translation as a face-to-face encounter with otherness; second, translation as interface for hosting such an encounter, an interactive, process-oriented, and spatially complex ‘interface of the deep’; and third, translation as human-machine interaction, leveraging neural machine translation to engage users in the process of translation, highlighting the untranslatable otherness of texts in translation.
