As International Translation Day is celebrated on September 30 every year, this is an opportune time to reflect on the role of translation in our networked world and the opportunities and challenges that it offers.
In 2017, the International Federation of Translators recognised “the role of professional translation in connecting nations, and fostering peace, understanding and development”. The theme in 2024 is the challenges of copyright. As the organisers of ITD (International Translation Day) state, it is their remit to highlight “the recognition of translations as original creative works in their own right”.
This brings out important technical, ethical, and even philosophical issues that have always been associated with translation. Who owns a translated work? Is it the original creator or the translator?
What if the translation goes far beyond the scope of the original work? Would it still be considered a translation or become an original work?
Such issues are not limited to the creative translation of novels or poems but apply to legal, commercial, and administrative documents.
Part of this debate is whether translation is a creative process. While many agree that it is because the translator is re-creating a text for a specific linguistic audience, others believe that translators are not doing anything original – just working on an already established text but in another language.
This is more of a grey area in less creative fields, particularly in legal and commercial documents. Who owns the copyright of a translated text? Is it the original owners of the document who may have interpreted the law in a certain way, or the translator whose translation may be slightly different from the original?
Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence have changed the nature of this conversation altogether. Today, when a translation can be created within minutes by AI, who would the translator be acknowledged to be? Even leaving the trustworthiness of the translation aside, would a machine be likely to be the translator?
In current debates on translation, a machine has not yet been recognised as owning the copyright to a document. That is because machines are not seen to be ‘intellectual creators’, unlike human translators.
The laws regarding copyright in translation are less clear when it comes to literary texts. If a work is commissioned to be translated, the copyright often remains with the original author, but when translations are publicly available, older texts like the classics, the translator does have copyright as the process would require more creativity.
Translators have increasingly been asking for more legal protection of their work and be seen as producers of original work, rather than just mechanical re-writers of existing texts. This debate is not merely academic but has significant implications in the legal and commercial fields where a word or a phrase can carry much weight. The burden on translators is not light.
Today, we need more translations to ensure continuous and seamless communication across cultures, whether in a literary or commercial sphere. Recognising the role of translators as producers of original knowledge and texts will protect them and ensure equitable compensation for their work.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
