*** Call for Papers ***

The Department of Translation at Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Translation Society will hold a symposium on the affordances of the Sinophone literary translator in the age of AI, at which the distinguished scholar-translators Michael Berry and Douglas Robinson (with Sun Xiaorui) will deliver keynote addresses.

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First proposed by the psychologist J. J. Gibson in 1979 as a way of understanding the way an environment affords animals  opportunities for support and sustenance, the concept of an affordance soon went viral, and has become a term of art in both the  social sciences and the humanities if not the life sciences. Scholars have been applying it to literary translation in recent years. A substantial article on the topic was published last year by Douglas Robinson, who glosses affordances as resources (among other terms) and focuses on the uses to which a translator can put these resources.

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This symposium is an opportunity to focus more narrowly on the uses to which translators of literary works in Chinese languages have put the resources available to them, including the resources they have mined and refined. Anyone who is working on the translation of  literature into or out of a Chinese language should not find such a “narrow” focus confining; we invite scholars and translators alike to  think along the following lines (without being limited by them):

• The use of lexical or grammatical resources to create a new literary idiom

• The use of literary resources to reinvent a work in another genre

• The use of intermedial resources, for instance taking inspiration from film or drama

• The use of interpersonal resources, such as innovative ways of working with authors and editors

• The use of institutional resources, including different sources of funding and channels for publication and canonization

• The use of technological resources, from Double Dragon/Dictate to DeepL/ChatGPT

• The use of cultural resources to render aspects of a work relevant to a given target audience

The latest resource that translators might exploit is AI technology, which seems to hang like a sword of Damocles above our necks (thanks to Andrea Musumeci for the simile), but which might allow us to slice our way through some particularly knotty problems.