Who Are We Translating For?Who Is Translating? Traductologie de plein champ

Wrocław (Poland), March 12 and 13, 2026
Interactions between Translations, Translators, and Contemporary Audiences
Sherbrooke (Quebec), April 16 and 17, 2026
Translation and Community
Liège (Belgium), May 12 and 13, 2026
Translation and Questions of Ethics and Deontology

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Is it the end of translation? Should we bid farewell to universality? Our era is not only one of articial intelligence (AI); it is also marked by the fragmentation of societies, political entities, professions (particularly translation) and audiences. Translation and translation training are at the heart of these developments, which aect professionals, teachers, students, and translation audiences alike. We propose to examine how a narrower focus on a specic audience can lead to dierent translations. Indeed, while the shift from the widespread distribution of audiovisual products (broadcasting) to targeted distribution (narrowcasting) has raised a whole series of questions that go far beyond the eld of marketing, t he orientation of translation towards a specic a udience r aises q uestions a bout the p ractices, s trategies, professional proles, and ethical, deontological, and ideological issues of translation. All of these changes are underpinned by two related questions:

1) Who are we translating for? Communication, especially when it is multilingual, is becoming increasingly calibrated: it is multiplying to target specic audiences, often driven by tools that rely on the use of big data, for better—reaching audiences that were previously marginalized or even ignored, with implications for citizenship and inclusivity— or for the worse—sometimes transnational and multilingual inuence campaigns designed to sway political or societal choices, with democratic and civic implications.

2) Who is translating ? Translation graduates; specialized audiences; members of the same social group with shared identities; IT professionals; conversational agents... Computerization, as we know, has led to a fragmentation of professional translation. Its most recent expression, at the perhaps precarious time when we are launching this call for papers, will it have the opposite eect, given that it is a general-purpose technology, as indicated by the acronym GPT (General Purpose Technology), even if the iconic ChatGPT originally owes the second part of its name to (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer)?

The organizing committee of this international conference (Belgium, France, Poland, Quebec, Switzerland) certainly does not believe that human translation will disappear; however, believing is not enough: we must argue, we must demonstrate, we must organize ourselves to weigh in and show the place of human translation in today's world. Has the audience for translation changed? If so, how? How does accessibility shape translation practices and broaden the very concept of translation? How and why is the identity of the translator now taking center stage? Can everything be translated, and for everyone? What are the ethical, professional, environmental, and democratic issues at stake in translation in the age of AI? How can we ensure that these issues are visible in the public and private sectors? What role does human translation still play, and what role should machine translation play in various areas of public life (justice, hospitals, politics, etc.)? How can training programs anticipate these developments?

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Le colloque Traductologie de plein champ se décline en trois lieux et trois périodes :

• Wrocław (Pologne), les 12 et 13 mars 2026

• Sherbrooke (Québec), les 16 et 17 avril  2026

• Liège (Belgique), les 12 et 13 mai 2026

Les participant⋅es sont invité⋅es à mentionner dans leur proposition de communication leur lieu de préférence, sachant que chaque institution propose un angle d’approche différent à la thématique « Pour qui traduire ? Qui pour traduire ? » :

• Interactions entre les traductions, les traducteur⋅ices et les publics contemporains (Université de Wrocław)

• Traduction et communauté (Université de Sherbrooke)

• Traduction et questions d’éthique et de déontologie (Université de Liège)