The Timely Archiving of Translation Technologies: Transformation, Challenges and Trends

This talk aims to present the launch of a project related to the archiving of a profession-specific technology, namely translation tools. The goal of this project, in addition to the timely preserving of an accessible yet slowly disappearing generation of both obsolete machines and early versions of more recent software, is to show that this profession often seen as antagonistic towards new tools has always been tech-savvy, but also to highlight transversal trends in their evolution, across decades, types of software, and platforms. This endeavour involves multiple challenges, starting with the combination of non-digital, digitized and born-digital tools. And while this last category easily is the most common nowadays, this technology adds a new layer of complexity that is tied to the platformization of the profession and practices, to the growing proportion of subscription-based services, to the long-established presence of AI and automation practices in the field, to the arrival of multimodal software, etc.