The brief.
Our very last weekly task Speculative Futures asked us to consider plausible or possible futures about our relationship with text/technology in the next 30 years. We had to choose the media to present these ‘futures’ and consider characters and their backgrounds as we crafted each narrative, one utopian and one dystopian.
The task.
-
In this final weekly task, I have focused on one piece of text technology that relates to many of our weekly topics, right from week 2 and thinking about how language shapes the way we think. I have also chosen this same technology for my final assignment work as it is deeply connected with my role as an English as an Additional Language teacher. So, what is this tech and how does it relate to media, education, text, and technology? Enter Machine Translation, or nowadays, ‘Neural Machine Translation’ (NMT). In both of the stories below, you will be introduced to an NMT device called ‘Weaver’ (named after Warren Weaver, the grandfather of modern computer translation). Weaver, like the technologies we heard about in The Future of Digital Literacies is not positive, negative, or neutral. Since it employs AI to analyze and translate between two languages, and as was said in Lessons from the AI Mirror, NMT reflects us and amplifies our patterns in sometimes inscrutable ways. More on that in my final assignment. Ready? Here we go.
-
This narrative answers the question: What if NMT could help two people share stories across language barriers and cultivate a deeper cultural connection to language? The setting of this story might not seem like it’s set in 2051. But, we are very far away from this kind of translation capability for smaller, lesser known languages. Watch the video below to understand my vision of that future.
-
This narrative answers the question: What if NMT didn’t deepen cultural understanding, but rather accelerated the loss of cultural information in its limited understanding of what it is translating? Open the PDF below to view the script for Weaver 2.
The takeaways.
I think a few things are obvious about this assignment. As much as I tried to do myself a favor and focus on one text technology (machine translation), I think that topic is still so big that I think my narratives only vaguely exploited the tech. They both focused more on character and world-building. Because of this, I wondered if I had lost the plot (pun intended) on this assignment. In terms of modes, I struggle with adapting text into video and audio. I used Adobe Spark for Weaver (1) and while it was very user friendly, I wasn’t thrilled with the results. In part because I was recording audio from my laptop mic and in part because I needed to rely on stock images. I was much happier with my script but this is a medium I am much more familiar with and have used before. Ultimately, my discomfort was obvious in the final product but it’s still good to practice and try new tools.