Alchemy of Translation

Translation is never neutral — it is always an act of interpretation, selection, and power. This session explores what happens when that act is handed to machines. Jockers’ Macroanalysis and Underwood’s Distant Horizons demonstrate how computational methods can reveal patterns across vast corpora that no individual reader could detect, but also how those methods flatten the linguistic and cultural specificities that make texts meaningful. Our guest, Farzad Mahootian from NYU, brings three decades of work at the intersection of philosophy, science, and multilingual inquiry. We also screen Ancestral Computation, a curated program featuring SWANA artists who use computation not as a tool of extraction but as a medium for cultural memory and resistance.

What is lost when translation becomes optimization? How do multilingual AI systems reinforce the dominance of English even when they claim to serve other languages? And what can artists and humanists teach us about forms of computation that center rather than erase cultural specificity?