Against market ideologies and AI-powered translation: Advancing a humane approach to translation and open science

The current model of knowledge construction, circulation, and translation appears unsustainable on several accounts in the context of the global publishing industry. This industry is now controlled by an oligopoly of publishers, is dependent in its functioning on the exploitation of authors, and unduly privileges scholarship produced in the Global North, and in a very limited number of languages. In this context, AI-generated and machine translation are increasingly called upon to provide immediate, multilingual dissemination of data and are promoted through a rhetoric of equity, despite the fact that they exacerbate already entrenched inequities in global knowledge circulation. Encounters in translation actively promotes an alternative model that challenges the global publishing industry and its increased dependence on AI-powered automated translation. The journal adopts an open, multilingual, and community-supported translation model that recognizes the labour of editors, authors, and translators, and promotes open science and the inclusion of scholars located in the Global South. We write on behalf of the editors of the journal to call for adopting a model of humane translation that seeks to enrich scientific dialogue and deliberation, open up disciplinary, language, and racial silos, and bypass inequitable and ecocidal AI-powered infrastructures that reduce translation to a mere vector of large-scale dissemination of research findings. Harnessing the potential of the open science movement, transdisciplinarity, and translation studies from this critical perspective allows us to create humane translational spaces that can accommodate equitable and sustainable ecosystems of knowledge production and circulation. A longer abstract of this article in this language can be found here: synopsis.