Panelists & Abstracts

Leilei Chen is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Re-orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-cultural Understanding (University of Regina Press, 2016) and a poetry chapbook, i give birth to my body. She is the Mandarin translator (both simplified and traditional Chinese) of Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, 2019; Yilin Press in China, 2017) and the translator of MA Hui’s contemporary poetry, I Have Forsaken Heaven and Earth, but Never Forsaken You (Frontenac House, 2023). Her translations of Chinese women’s fiction and ecological writings are anthologized in Virginia’s Sisters: An Anthology of Women’s Writing (Aurora Metro Books, 2023) and Environmental Futures: An International Literary Anthology (Brandeis University Press, 2024). Her Chinese version of Margaret Laurence’s short stories, A Bird in the House, is forthcoming in 2026.

Abstract:

Reverse translation entered into my life when, as an established scholar of English studies, I developed a growing interest in contemporary Chinese literature. Living in between Mandarin—my mother tongue—and English—the adopted language of my Canadian life, I embrace reverse translation almost instinctively. The publication of MA Hui’s contemporary Chinese poetry, I Have Forsaken Heaven and Earth, but Never Forsaken You, marked public recognition of this artistic endeavour. Yet the challenges I have encountered in the translation and publication of other projects call for urgent critical inquiry.

My experience suggests that resistance to reverse translation often stems from a parochial belief that one can only be at their best with their native language rather than in an acquired one. Such bias overlooks the evolving nature of linguistic competence. Decades of immersion in another language can elevate one’s proficiency to a level that rivals native fluency.

 Within this context, the pursuit of reverse translation shifts from a personal passion to a political act. It becomes a means of self-expression and a movement against parochialism, racism, and colonialism. As these epistemological frameworks are grounded in a problematically static notion of self, reverse translation as artistic creation foregrounds the figure of the mediator who embodies the fluidity of cultural identity. As she crosses cultural borders, her linguistic self expands, enabling her to translate not only in both directions but also across multiple horizons.

Simon Copet holds a Master’s degree in Translation (research focus) and is currently a PhD student jointly supervised by the Université libre de Bruxelles and the University of Mons (Belgium). His doctoral dissertation focuses on the training and evaluation of machine translation systems, with the goal of their application to video game localization. His research also focuses on the language of gaming, specifically on the concept of irrealia.

Abstract:

This presentation will address the issue of neural machine translation and generative artificial intelligence applied to video game localization. First, the inherent constraints of translating video games will be discussed. Next, I will present two experiments carried out at the University of Mons (Belgium), in which students were asked to translate and post-edit games with varying degrees of fictionality (Killer Trait and Baldur’s Gate 3). From a methodological standpoint, the translations were evaluated by external professional reviewers. The results of these studies indicate that neural machine translation systems and artificial intelligence can represent both an asset and a risk. Indeed, the students who engaged in post-editing showed higher productivity compared to their peers who translated the text manually. However, these experiments also revealed that the post-editing process prevented students from detecting certain errors, whereas those who carried out a full human translation sometimes made fewer mistakes and demonstrated greater creativity.

Bio-note

Simon Copet holds a Master’s degree in Translation (research focus) and is currently a PhD student jointly supervised by the Université libre de Bruxelles and the University of Mons (Belgium). His doctoral dissertation concerns the training and evaluation of machine translation systems, with a view to their application to video game localization. His research also focuses on the language of gaming, and more specifically on the notion of irrealia.

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator whose work has appeared in Canadian and international publications including The Walrus and The Globe and Mail, Grain. Her collection What if red ran out (Goose Lane Editions, 2008) was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and won the 2009 Gerald Lampert award for best first book. She has been guest faculty at Bishop’s University, part-time creative writing faculty at Concordia University, and has taught in CEGEPS and in the community. She curated the Atwater Poetry Project series, has been a guest editor for The New Quarterly, and was editor-in-chief at Arc poetry magazine. She was a founding editor of the Icehouse Poetry imprint at Goose Lane Editions, and associate editor with Linda Leith Publishing. She is frequently solicited as a member of literary and grant juries, on consultative bodies, and as a book reviewer. Her numerous book translations span fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and include works by Nicole Brossard, Martine Delvaux, Stéphane Martelly, and Marie-Célie Agnant. She also has a regular literary translation column in Maisonneuve magazine, “Writing from Québec.” She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for translation three times, for David Clerson’s first novel, Brothers (QC Fiction, 2016), Alina Dumitrescu’s A Cemetery for Bees (LLP, 2021), and Marie-Claire Blais’s Nights Too Short to Dance (Second Story Press, 2023); she won the award for the latter. Her translation of Clerson’s short story collection, To See Out the Night (QC Fiction, 2022) won the Cole Foundation Prize for translation.

Abstract: 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed, expanded, and used at an exponentially increasing rate, and for an ever-broader range of applications—from the potentially gainful to the absurdly silly. Translation is no exception, with neural machine programs relying on complex and not altogether transparent algorithms to produce relatively accurate and natural-sounding translations. The extension of AI translation and machine translation tools to literary translation would seem inevitable; however, as this paper suggests, what is lost in AI translation runs counter to the very nature of the artistic process of literary creation, including translation. Machine translation is still flawed, producing often hilarious homophonic results. AI is also notably biased. As well, there are social and especially environmental costs to AI use. Beyond theses comic, prejudicious, or ecologically disastrous disadvantages, the narrowness of the texts produced by machine translation and the removal of various inherently human traits, such as linguistic association and error, from the activity, lead to reductive results. The focus on accuracy and the mechanisms of linguistic segmentation actually undermine meaning, which in the creative arts is generated by indirect, less equivalency-based processes. Humans manage and produce semantic information associatively, through instinct and memory. which are fed by adjacency—the production of meaning through slant or meandering trajectories—and by latency—meaning derived from personal or contextual connections not directly related to the source text. Even the kind of mistakes humans make, lead to potentially unexpected and artful solutions to translation problems. The creative and re-creative act of literary translation is considered, the authorial implication of the literary translator is broached, and the defining characteristics of art are raised.  

Damien is an assistant professor of translation and AI at the ULB, in Belgium. He worked broadly on using personalized corpora, CAT tools and machine translation in creative sectors, focusing mainly on literature and video games. His thesis focused on the possibility and limitations of customized MT systems for literary translators, on their ability to learn patterns of style, as well as on the ergonomic and broader social issues surrounding the advances of technology in this field. Recently, his research shifted towards the effects of translation tools on the cognitive processes and socio-economic factors involved in literary translation, but his interests also brought him to the field of game studies, with the recent publication of a book on the meta-languages and social semiotics of video games.

Abstract:  

Since the advent of neural machine translation (NMT), more and more research has delved into the topic of literary machine translation, focusing more recently on the possibility of customizing these tools for this particular activity (Kenny and Winters 2024). In this context, our previous work aimed to assess the technical feasibility of individualized and style-adaptive NMT. While the conclusions of this work were largely positive, further experiments were recently carried out to reinforce the ecological validity of the research, by conducting an expert evaluation during which we asked a professional literary translator to translate three chapters with the help of this customized system. To that end, we adopted the methodology presented by Borg (2023), combining various investigation methods to uncover the cognitive and creative processes of a translator working in situ. These experiments indeed show a path towards more useful, adapted and personalized tools for creative texts. However, they also highlight the heavy limitations and constraints of the current interfaces and modalities of the human-machine interaction, indicating the need for more customizable and tailored computer-assisted tools, as well as for more user-centred research. Our conclusions therefore raise newfound questions regarding the ergonomic aspects of translation technology, while also addressing the ethical concerns and societal issues around it. But, more importantly, they indicate that it is possible to reimagine such tools and rethink their use in a way that better serves the human-machine interaction, the creative process and the quality of translated texts. 

Anindita Mukherjee is a poet, editor, translator and a PhD student at the Department of English and Film Studies in University of Alberta. Her latest book How Silkworms Break Their Eggs: Selected Poems (2024) brings for the first time the Bengali poet Mridul Dasgupta’s works in English, which was nominated for the 2025 Kala Literature Awards. In 2022, her first chapbook Nothing and Variations was selected as the top ten Young Indian Voices. Her poems and critical works have appeared in The Guernica Editions, The Antonym, Madras Courier, The Lake, Poetry Pause: The League of Canadian Poets, Pamenar Press, and The Paris Institute of Critical Thinking, among others. Currently, she is working on her full-length poetry collection, titled Nothing Happens in Edmonton. 

Abstract: 

David Mraček, in “Inverse translation: the more challenging direction”, describes inverse translation—translation from one’s mother tongue into another language—as not only difficult but also an “uncharted territory.” He draws on Peter Newmark’s well-known dictum that warns against inverse translation: “translate into your language of habitual use, since that is the only way you can translate naturally, accurately and with maximum effectiveness” (3). Yet, as Mraček notes, the hegemonic status of English has rendered inverse translation both widespread and increasingly visible. The challenges of inverse translation include the expectation of mastering a “native” language as a non-native speaker, as well as the inevitability of never being fully “authentic” in the target language. To engage these obstacles, I turn to Yoko Tawada’s concept of “exophony” in Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003). Exophony amplifies aspects of inverse translation while simultaneously breaking down the rigid boundary between inverse and direct translation. It introduces the notion of “adoption” as a lens to understand how exophonic texts are “determined by secondariness in the relationship between language and speaker” (Ivanovic 172). In my presentation, I will highlight Tawada’s deliberate choice to write in German rather than her native Japanese. Her embrace of linguistic foreignness both distanced her from and drew her closer to her mother tongue, offering a way to bypass the binary of inverse versus direct translation. This strategy foregrounds the significance of “self-translation” as an exophonic literary practice. Moreover, I will explore how her voyages outside the mother tongue were shaped not only by language but also by space, as reflected in the multiple cities that became objects of her imaginative ekphrastic analysis.

Poète, dramaturge, et traductrice, Pierrette Requier a grandi dans un village du nord de l’Alberta où elle a composé avec deux langues qui se parlaient constamment. Ce « bi-langue- uisme » a coloré ses écrits. Femme, elle devient citadine d’Edmonton et œuvre depuis plus d’une trentaine d’années au cœur de la vie littéraire de la capitale.  Nommée Poète officielle en 2015 -2017 Pierrette Requier se sert de l’oralité pour donner vie à la poésie.

Pierrette served as the literary representative of RAFA (Regroupement artistique francophone de l’Alberta) and on the board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, fostering liaisons between the English and French literary communities of Edmonton, organized and hosted multilingual, and interdisciplinary events.  As a result of collaborative commissions, her work appears as, a mural featuring a trilingual Edmonton City Poem, and a bilingual rendition of The Legend of The Flying Canoe. In 2022 she was granted the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award by the Writers guild of Alberta for her work as a literary community builder.

Abstract:

Pierrette Requier, Fille du vent et des grandes prairies canadiennes, et Femme de ville vous racontera son parcours d’écrivaine illustrant la façon dont, à travers les années, elle a pu composer et traduire, se servant de ses deux langues qui se parlaient constamment dans sa pensée. Enseignante en immersion, elle a aimé faire valoir la beauté de la langue française à ses élèves! Son parcours d’écrivaine l’a amener à profondément apprécier la richesse de son “bilinguisme”, une dualité innée. Un peu “Clown”, elle s’est spontanément décrit : Je suis “une pure-laine *bi-langue”, “I am a dyed-in-the-wool bilingual”!

Pierrette Requier, Daughter of the Wind, and City Woman, was raised in a home where it was natural to speak “a bilingual patois”. Using both languages at once, she will tell you the story of how, immersing in a writing practise at mid-life, and committing much time to orality, she came to appreciate and cultivate, and her linguistic duality. Engaging in the anglophone and francophone literary organisations and communities of Edmonton, at once, and creating liaisons between the two, she came to know the joy of delighting two languages. Eventually, loving to engage in the challenge of translating, she revelled even more deeply in the intricacy of languages coming together, of rendering as accurately as possible.

Roula Salam is an ATIA certified Arabic-English translator. She was the past president of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta (ATIA) for two mandates, and is currently on the board on the Canadian Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters Council (CTTIC) and is the Vice President of the International Federation of Translators (FIT). She is a lecturer at the English Language School, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta (2012 – present) and holds a PhD degree in Postcolonial Studies from Queen’s University.

Abstract: 

AI has profoundly impacted our professions and our lives, from changing the way we conduct research and analyze data to diagnosing medical treatments, enhancing education, and improving our work efficiency. Undoubtedly, AI has also transformed the way translators and interpreters work. In the field of translation, interpretation, and terminology, AI tools have made simple tasks much easier and help provide quick access to information in many languages. However, linguists are facing a growing uncertainty: Will linguists, translators, and interpreters be replaced by AI? How does AI impact our profession, and will translators, terminologists and interpreters remain relevant in the future? This talk will focus on the ethical question of AI in the field and discuss the urgent need for us to rethink our strategies and roles as we navigate this new horizon. The discussion will draw on my own ideas and some of the research and important discussions shared at the FIT World Congress 2025 held at the World Intellectual Property Organization Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.