340247 VO Transcultural Communication (2023S)

The lecture starts by explaining the two fundamental concepts of "transculturality" and "transcultural communication" and their underlying conceptions of "culture". The two concepts will then be linked to multilingual technologies and/or translation technologies and specifically to online collaborative translation. The various core subforms of online collaborative translation such as translation crowdsourcing which is also increasingly used in the translation industry as paid translation crowdsourcing as well as the various forms of online fan translations will the thoroughly discussed. It will be shown how these subforms may be conceptualised as prototypical types of transcultural communication. The concept of (online) collaborative translation, however, is a much broader one to also include translation memories, terminological resources etc. Also the interaction between human translators and machine translation systems may be subsumed under the concept of "online collaborative translation" and thus as a prototypical type of "transcultural communication". Online collaborative translations as prototypical forms of transcultural communication will be investigated from a critical perspective and against the concepts of work/labour and also exploitation.
The course will also provide students with approaches, theories and methods to investigate these phenomena of human-machine-interaction from a socio-technological perspective in order to already prepare students for their master thesis.