Abstract
The advances and promises of digital translation technologies, largely spurred by AI-based neural machine translation, have led to unprecedented productivity in professional translation workflows. As conventional critical analysis has it, however, the casualties of productivity boosts and wealth accumulation lie below the visible part of the ‘digital’ iceberg. Hence, and in conjunction with the volume editors’ aim to “enhance our understanding of the evolving practices adopted by the translation industry and the stakeholders in the neoliberal era”, this paper will shed a critical eye on the discursive and social repercussions of translation technologies, especially in relation to (semi-)automated translation workflows. The paper presents a theoretical and conceptual outline of various sociotechnical concepts—e.g. machinic assemblage, digital forces and relations of production, translation think tank—in conjunction with a cursory critical analysis of the discourse of tech-lobby organizations such as Slator and the Translation Automation User Society. The analysis also establishes a conceptual link with the discourse of neoliberal ideology and with the ‘techno-triumphalism’ of today’s digital industrialists. The paper argues that the leading entrepreneurs in the globalised language and translation markets oversee neo-Taylorist management practices and post-Fordist production lines which, unprecedented in complexity and scale, will lead to entirely new forms of economic disenfranchisement and labour alienation. In other words, the increasing automation and datafication in the digital economy of translation engenders novel forms of exploitation and labour control.