IAS Library Suggests!

We are excited to invite you to the 2026 Colloquium of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Program in Translation and Interpreting Studies.

Guest Speaker: Renée Desjardins, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Université de Saint-Boniface (Treaty 1, Winnipeg, Canada)

Bionote: Renée Desjardins is an Associate Professor at the School of Translation at the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg (Treaty 1), Canada and an adjunct professor at the School of Continuing Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Translation and Social Media: In Theory, in Training, and in Professional Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the co-editor of When Translation Goes Digital: Case Studies and Critical Reflections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She has been researching and writing about translation and social media for over a decade and has published on the subject in several other outlets, including The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2020) and The Routledge Handbook of The Translation Industry (2025). Her most recent work, which has been funded institutionally and nationally, examines translation in the creator, influencer, and gig economies.

Talk Title:
To Adapt or Get Left Behind: How the History of the Social Internet Can Help Translators and Interpreters Understand and Navigate the Current AI Moment

Date & Time: Wednesday, May 6, 10:00–11:00 a.m.
Location: Zoom

Abstract: 

In 2017, I published Translation and Social Media: In Theory, In Training and in Professional Practice. At the time, the translation and social media landscape looked very different than they do today. In the book, I made the claim that social media presented translators (and language professionals more broadly) with many opportunities, including “augmenting” their practice and visibility (Desjardins 2017). I also argued that to stay competitive, it was essential that language professionals ‘lean into’ social media (deliberate phrasing that was partly informed by Facebook’s then-COO Sheryl Sandberg and her controversial bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead). In a sense, my phrasing and line of argumentation at the time was not dissimilar to today’s artificial intelligence hype, i.e. “adapt or get left behind”, a phrase which I have explicitly critiqued in recent work. In this presentation, I revisit the position I held in the 2010s and explain why I still stand by the importance and relevance of social media literacy and expertise for language professionals today. For instance, how would a translator know how to ‘translate for the algorithm’ if they don’t understand what ‘writing for the algorithm’ might mean? However, I also explain why I now have a more nuanced perspective given the undeniable and radical shift towards technocapitalism, tech surveillance (cf. Zuboff 2019), and technofeudalism at scale (cf. Varoufakis 2023). In examining what we have learnt from the evolution of the social internet over the last 30 years, we can see what ‘hype’ patterns and trends emerge and why Silicon Valley/Big Tech is intent on normalized extraction and surveillance. I connect these trends to recent and current discourse within the language industry, notably on platforms like LinkedIn, which are used by Translation and Interpreting Studies researchers and language professionals alike. Is artificial intelligence in our profession as inevitable as the claims made by Silicon Valley and the language industry? What about our data rights, human rights, and rights to online privacy (cf. Wong 2023)? Do phrases like ‘human-in-the-loop’ or ‘human-first’ protect language workers and professionals or are they discursive salves to make extraction and slop more palatable? Finally, and perhaps more provocatively, are we facing an illusory binary, i.e. to adopt or get dropped, or do we in fact have more agency and more options than Big Tech and Big Translation are leading us to believe?