Uncovering the creative process: from inception to reception of translated content using machine translation

2026-07-22

The new machine translation paradigm, neural machine translation, has drastically changed society’s perception of technology and the act of translation. It has also motivated a series of claims by research labs and the media implying that machines will soon decode the transfer of one language to another, thus driving professional translators out of their jobs. Creative content producers, such as streaming platforms or publishing houses, are now exploring, testing or using neural machine translation. Yet little is known of the constraints this technology poses to translators’ creative process and how such constraints impact the users. The need to understand this has become essential to sustain translation richness, translators’ job satisfaction, authors’ and directors’ reputations, and the user experience. INCREC aims to uncover the creative stages of professional translators to understand how technology can be best applied to the translation of literary and audiovisual texts, and to analyse the impact of these processes on readers and viewers. The research project is articulated in four work packages that cover two broad areas: inception and reception of literary and audiovisual translation. To better understand this complex process, INCREC triangulates data from eye-tracking, retrospective think-aloud interviews, translated material, and questionnaires from professional translators and users. Thus, INCREC develops a new theoretical framework that encompasses a) creative stages in translation, b) classification and mapping of translation problems which require a higher level of creativity and cognition, as well as a classification of the solutions to these problems c) understanding how machine translation is most effectively used during this creative process, and d) understanding user attention to creativity in translated literary texts and films. This is achieved using a new combination of methods from different disciplines.

Netherlands

2025-11-01