The Linguist

26 The Linguist Vol/60 No/2 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com OPINION & COMMENT Are current translation practices sustainable as the climate crisis looms? A clarion call for eco-translation MICHAEL CRONIN Kavanagh – the main character in John Lanchester's novel The Wall (2019), set in the near future in a Britain adjusting to the effects of severe climate disruption – reflects on the catastrophic legacy of the failure to act on climate change: "None of us can talk to our parents. By 'us' I mean my generation, people born after the Change. You know that thing where you break up with someone and say, It's not you, it's me? This is the opposite. It's not us, it's them. Everyone knows what the problem is. The diagnosis isn't hard – the diagnosis isn't even controversial. It's guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It's true. That's exactly what they did. They know it. We know it. Everybody knows it." So what would Kavanagh say to translators? Would we be guilty parties? Do we have the soot of fossil fuels on our hands? Should the translation profession be part of the debate on the climate emergency? Thinking about eco-translation means reflecting on how translation practice impacts on the present environmental crisis. It involves evaluating the resource implications of current uses of technology and advancing alternative scenarios for the development of sustainable technology practices at the level of tools and tool use. We might begin by looking around our desk. The screens. The laptop. The hard drive. The mobile phone. There is nothing virtual about the ecological impact of the virtual. It is damagingly real. Phones, servers, computers all contain metals that are difficult to extract and recycle: copper, aluminium, antimony, arsenic, steel, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, platinum, ferrite, gold, indium, lead, nickel, silver, tin, zinc. Transmission equipment, aerials and transoceanic cables expand in number and energy consumption to meet the exponential needs of information-hungry applications. In the debates around the use of machine translation the question of the growing carbon footprint is rarely, if ever, addressed, as if the transition to automated forms of translation had zero environmental consequences. Of course, these issues affect all industries that use information and communication technology (ICT). However, it is not only a question of the tools we use but what we use them for. The coupling of ICT and the liberalisation of markets at the end of the 20th century led to the exponential rise of the localisation industry. A typical pitch can be found on the Lionbridge website: "The best way to cater to global markets and customers is to offer your app in their native language. A recent survey by Common Sense Advisory found that more than half of global consumers only buy products from websites that provide information in their own language." Production, consumption, translation and technology are carefully combined in the commercial blandishment of major global purveyors of translation services and technologies. The industry is thriving because the demand for translation continues to grow worldwide. Indeed, this growth is both a driver of expanding ICT capacity on the planet, and facilitated by it. The very rationale for translation investment is bound up with an ideal of endlessly expanding markets for goods and services. The problem is that this culture of infinite growth is no longer sustainable. In 2019, the UK-based Institute for Public Policy pointed out in a report entitled 'This is a Crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown': "the actions required to mitigate breakdown [climate catastrophe] are structural, involving deep and rapid economic, social and political change across all of society and every nation on earth." An essential part of that structural change is consuming less, not more. Eco-translation: a solution? So how can sustainable technology practices be developed? From the point of view of supply-side ecology, this might involve redesigning ICT devices to radically reduce the consumption of scarce or hazardous materials; or producing devices with optimised capacity for recycling, thereby putting an end to recycling practices which endanger the lives of adults and children in developing countries. Modular manufacturing practices could be adopted to allow for easier repairs and reuse of component parts. Compatibility could be increased or made mandatory, not just for chargers but for batteries, processors, ports and screens. There are precedents in Kerala, India and Catalonia, Spain for the use of lo-tech data transmission networks which dramatically cut energy consumption. 1 World in our hands?

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