Digital Translation: A Dead Fairy

Sougata Dutta
04 November, 2022
2 mins ago

Is Literature eventually losing its soul? Let’s read on to know more…

Any literature or piece of writing translated through a digital medium is called Digitally Translated literature and the process is called Digital Translation.

The advancement of technology has made translation so easy, but gives qualitatively poor translation. During the very early phase, there was only word to word translation, but now with the development of AI, the digital translation engines are capable of translating merely a paragraph with a little bit of smart understanding.

Translation Literature

Translation literature is very much necessary to reach out to the readers beyond the borders of nation and language. All the profound pieces of literature have been translated in so many languages.

Importance of translation literature

Firstly, translation literature is needed to reach more readers. But, translation literature doesn’t mean only word to word, but a complete transformation of its perspective, notions and mood.

As during the beginning of translation literature, there were mainly two authorities who used to do that. One is the imperialist european authorities and another is the socialist Russia. The imperialists intended to promote their culture and style of literature and also tried to grasp all other folk literature of their colonies. Hence they worked so much on translating their own literatures to the colonial languages.

Whereas, Russia tried to promote the idea of marxism and socialism and tried to nourish people worldwide.

Afterwards, translation literature became a famous genre and we can find most of the literature in translated forms.

Digital Translation and its gigantic growth

Development and craze of translation literature has gone to a next level and hence it was the need of time to shift towards digital translation. And as the digital process is taking so less time taking, translation through digital media started growing so fast and so vast.

The fallacy of Digital Translation

But, it is not as smart or soulful as a human being, even after so much development of AI that is done in translation literature. There is a huge vocabulary, so many ornamentations. But yet it can't catch human feelings and emotions. So, digitally translated literature is like a very beautiful fairy but without its soul.

Future possibilities

It is well accepted that computers can't be as efficient as the human brain. But there is still huge scope to develop AI as science has grown so much in the case of studying the human brain. So, in the future, digital translation may help us to understand the human mindset, and in that case digital translation can really bring a revolutionary change in the case of translation literature.