TY - JOUR
T1 - Supralingualism and the Translatability Industry
AU - Gramling, David
N1 - Funding Information:
CLIR/MLIR research, in turn, has been funded at least in its initial iterations by state organizations like the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, and the People’s Republic of China’s Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security. It may help to reflect on the titles of some indicative recent work in this arena, as well as on the robust institutional affiliations of their authors:
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.
PY - 2020/2/1
Y1 - 2020/2/1
N2 - This article argues that a new form of globalizing multilingualism, which I call 'supralingualism', has been afoot since 1990, when the rise of algorithmic translation and cross-linguistic information retrieval (CLIR) practices set in in earnest in the supply-side logistics industries. A political landscape characterized by international consensus and compliance in the 1990s (as opposed to tariff wars and logistical nationalism) further buttressed this new ideology, leading to a newly multilingual centripetality in the global management of meaning. Based on historical examples and evidence from computational engineering, this article tracks the extraordinary growth of this sector and its implications for other arenas of language practice, implications that include: monolingualization, securitization, dehistoricization, lexicaliztation, and the reduction of 'culture' to its most overt linguistic forms.
AB - This article argues that a new form of globalizing multilingualism, which I call 'supralingualism', has been afoot since 1990, when the rise of algorithmic translation and cross-linguistic information retrieval (CLIR) practices set in in earnest in the supply-side logistics industries. A political landscape characterized by international consensus and compliance in the 1990s (as opposed to tariff wars and logistical nationalism) further buttressed this new ideology, leading to a newly multilingual centripetality in the global management of meaning. Based on historical examples and evidence from computational engineering, this article tracks the extraordinary growth of this sector and its implications for other arenas of language practice, implications that include: monolingualization, securitization, dehistoricization, lexicaliztation, and the reduction of 'culture' to its most overt linguistic forms.
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U2 - 10.1093/applin/amz023
DO - 10.1093/applin/amz023
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85082081878
VL - 41
SP - 129
EP - 147
JO - Applied Linguistics
JF - Applied Linguistics
SN - 0142-6001
IS - 1
ER -