Interlingual (Re)Mediation: Translation between virtual reality and effective engagement

This paper explores the relationship between translation – as a process and
a product – and remediation as put forward by Bolter and Grusin’s study of new
media (1999). Parallels are drawn between the key concepts identified by Bolter and
Grusin – namely mediation, immediacy/hypermediacy and remediation – and the
theory and practice of interlinguistic translation, with the aim to tentatively contribute
another angle to the expanding array of metaphors recently investigated by scholars in
Translation Studies in its transdisciplinary scope. The suggestion is made that – much
as the assumed directness of new digital media presupposes in fact new layers of mediation – the long-held view of translation that promotes an effacing of the translator’s
intervention is fictive. Even the assumed immediacy of translation tools and software
is questioned: subjective human intervention is still needed to determine the rules,
lexicons or corpora to be fed into the various software, but by not acknowledging it,
machine translation is posited as objective and thereby relieved of responsibility. A
few examples are provided to challenge the supposed desirability of transparency in
translation and promote instead an awareness that remediation – meant both as an
extra medium and as restorative agency – may actually better fulfil the goals of intercultural communication.