Disempowering the Translator as Intercultural Mediator. The Age of the New Media
Disempowering the Translator as Intercultural Mediator. The Age of the New Media

Summary/Abstract: Marketing quality translations in view of advertising local cultures has become increasingly difficult in the context of the omnipresent electronic means of getting the message across. Today, intercultural mediation via translation has added the machine element to the traditional actors involved in the procedure. Machine translation – whether rule based, transfer based, dictionary based, example based, interlingual or statistical – is ideally intended to assist human translators, yet it frequently seems to be the only preferred alternative in accessing texts produced in a foreign language, bypassing the services of a qualified translator, especially for time and money related reasons. Under the circumstances, the tremendous threats that machine translation poses to the quality of the translated text, especially if it is a literary one, need special consideration. Along these lines, the present paper focuses on a case study presupposing the translation of a famous poem by the Romanian nineteenth century poet Mihai Eminescu through Google Translate, comparing and contrasting it with an authorized version by a nineteen-year old translator-genius who died in the 1977 earthquake, published posthumously. It is available in print, as well as on the internet – as written text and as subtitling to poetry reading.

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