The advent of machine-assisted translation has brought forth lofty promises to revolutionize and streamline the painstaking work of translation, potentially rendering human translators obsolete. But will it? Rather than providing a definitive answer to this question, which risks playing into the fidelity-focused logic underlying machine translation, Robert-Foley's book encourages readers to dwell within the problem space opened by an algorithmic approach to translation. By reconceptualizing translation not merely as an intermediary process of transforming text from one language to another, but rather as an inherently creative endeavor with boundless potential, Robert-Foley invites readers to critically examine the impact of machines on translation and, by extension, on language itself.
Robert-Foley's book comprises seven chapters, each named after one of the seven translation procedures outlined by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, French linguists whose seminal work, Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais, significantly influenced the field of translation studies after it was published in 1958. These procedures, pivotal in formalizing translation studies and shaping the norms guiding machine translation, are organized sequentially from more ‘direct’ methods—those readily executable by machines—to more ‘oblique’ ones demanding greater stylistic intervention from human translators.
Rather than adhering strictly to the intended usage of each procedure, the book ‘hijacks’ them to illuminate not only the questionable assumptions underlying their formulation but also their role in perpetuating a structuralist language ideology that reinforces the signifying regimes of colonial powers (28). Chapters 1 to 3 deconstruct the ‘direct’ concepts—emprunt, calque, and literal translation—revealing their inherent interconnectedness and their shared reliance on a literalist perspective that reduces language to rigid systems of signifiers tethered to fixed external referents. Conversely, chapters 4 to 7 confront the ‘oblique’ procedures—transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation—demonstrating how translation inherently transcends the prescribed norms of fidelity, predictability, and productivity.
Robert-Foley proposes ‘experimental translation’, the eponymous concept of the book, as a practice to liberate translation from its prescribed norms, norms forged under capitalist and neocolonial regimes and codified into machine translation. The end of each chapter offers instructors and students exercises in experimental translation, designed to push the boundaries of translational norms and to underscore the innate creativity inherent in the act of translation.
In the book's concluding chapter, Robert-Foley acknowledges that experimental translation not only challenges the established norms of translation but also drives directly at the very essence of ‘language’ as shaped by settler-colonialism. Rather than viewing langue as a closed system of signs where differences between languages are obstacles to be overcome, Robert-Foley's experimental translation invites readers to embrace the gaps between standardized languages to critique the politics and policies that are aimed at erasing human difference. In doing so, Robert-Foley points readers to yet another space of inquiry, one that examines how language ideologies inform but do not totalize the pragmatics of language use. It is in exploring these multiple and sometimes conflicting normativities of sociopolitical life that we might come to reimagine language beyond the tired, dyadic models of signifier and signified.
