Much of the discourse around translation and Artificial Intelligence sees languages as codes and translation as the efficient transfer of information. But both languages and translation or much more complex than that: they are nuanced, embodied, particular and political. Emphasising the creativity of all language-use and the importance of so-called ‘low-resource’ languages, the AIDCPT project is developing fresh ways of thinking about the capabilities of AI translation, and new ways of using them. Details can be found here.
In this second symposium, we share our progress so far, and join in dialogue with related projects. Jun Wang and Qi Su from Peking University will show how they have used AI to trace intertextuality among classical Chinese texts, and to create an app that writes new classical Chinese poems. Poet and translator Philip Terry will explore points of contact between the world of AI translation and his own work in texts such Dictator, in which he recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in which he plays language games by the rules of Oulipo.
Programme
10:30 Matthew Reynolds, Joseph Hankinson, Deepshkiha Behera and Karen Cresci on the AIDCPT project
11:30 Qi Su and Jun Wang on AI and classical Chinese poetry
12:30-1:15 Lunch (sandwich lunch provided)
1:15 Philip Terry on intersections between AI and his Oulipian poetic and translation practice
2:15-3:00 General discussion
Deepshikha Behera completed her PhD at the the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. She now teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. She works on Miya poetry, and on translation as resistance.
Karen Cresci is Profesora Adjunta, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, and a Visiting Fellow at KU Leuven. She has written many articles on literature and translation, focusing especially on the work of Junot Díaz.
Qi Su is a tenured associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University (PKU), with a joint appointment in the School of EECS and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from PKU in 2007, followed by postdoctoral training at both PKU and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main research fields include natural language processing, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics. She has been honored with awards such as the NG Teng Fong Excellent Young Scholar Award and the Wang Xuan Young Scholar Award from PKU, as well as the First Rank of the Science and Technology Prize from the Chinese Institute of Electronics. Dr. Su has served as the PI for grants funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Beijing Social Science Foundation. Additionally, she has extensive experience teaching computing technology to Liberal Arts students through courses such as Introduction to Computing, Computer Practicum, Computational Linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics. Her research papers have been published in conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, as well as journals like Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and Neural Networks. Her current research focuses on developing NLP methodologies for ancient Chinese texts and analyzing historical corpora for cultural insights. Dr. Su is one of the founders of the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center.
Jun Wang is a professor in the Information Management Department at Peking University. He is the founder and the director of the Digital Humanities Research Center of Peking University. Currently his research is centered on the digital humanities and digital libraries, especially in the field of natural language processing of Chinese ancient texts with deep learning and knowledge graph technology. His research interests also include knowledge organization, information behavior and web product design. He was principal investigator of a number of research projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the National Social Science Fund of China Program (NSSFC), including the Construction of Knowledge Graph for the Chinese Confucian Academic History, a research project collaborated with the CBDB Group at Harvard University. In 2005, he was awarded the OCLC/ALISE Outstanding Research Fund for Library Science and Information Science in the United States. He has research papers published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences such as JASIST, JCDL, CIKM, Journal of Chinese Library, and Journal of Chinese Information Processing. In 2005, he was selected into the Excellent Talents Support Program in New Century by the Ministry of Education of China. In 2006, he was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award of Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Education of China. In 2013, he was awarded the title of Beijing Excellent Teacher.
Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante’s Inferno, Dante’s Purgatorio and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022.
