Translation, Social Media, and the Concept of Augmentation: The Good, The Bad, and The Interdisciplinary

Abstract

Using three key news items, this paper begins with a brief assessment of how the digital landscape has impacted the Canadian language services industry, with specific attention given to the relationship between social media and translation. While social media has generally created new opportunities for language experts (the "good"), it is our hypothesis that there remains a significant lack of consilience between these two academic disciplines and industry sectors (the "bad"). We believe that by underscoring the common ground between Translation Studies (TS) and Social Media Studies (SMS) (the "interdisciplinary"), we may find ways of 'augmenting' [1] the status and role of professional human translators. A literature survey of the journal Social Media + Society (all issues from 2015-2017) shows that translation---which is central or at least related to online communication---is never addressed head-on, serving as an illustration of the lack of disciplinary dialogue between TS and SMS. As a way of starting and/or encouraging a more overt disciplinary dialogue, we explore three specific areas that will serve as the basis for an on-going research project on the subject of translation and social media: 1) the value-added of professional translators in the context of social media monitoring; 2) self-translation phenomena on social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter; and, finally, 3) the necessity of human intervention in the translation of 'new' social languages such as Emoji. While empirical investigation is on-going, we believe this exploratory qualitative research speaks to anyone interested in intercultural communication in online settings (specifically on social media). The research can also be of interest to social platforms developers looking to embed translation applications within these platforms to optimize the user's experience. We leverage the methodological framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and context-oriented research to better understand and chart translation phenomena in social media contexts.