Tools for transforming translators into homo narrans or “what machines can't do”

This chapter suggests reconceptualising the role of the translator within the context of a translator as an adaptive expert, here understood in terms of creativity and the uniquely human ability to narrate – and proposes a procedure to foster this ability. Narrativity in translation has long been either undervalued or problematized (e.g. Baker, 2006). Yet, if we take as a given that the translation profession is at a crossroads (Katan, 2016; Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow, 2017), due in part to the advances in neural machine translation (NMT), then one way in which the translator may assert their added value is to focus attention on their uniquely human ability to knowingly create meaningful texts. The general thesis developed, is that while machines may successfully translate texts in the sense of copying or transcribing text from one language to another, the creation of texts meaningful for a particular readership in a particular moment is a uniquely homo sapiens or rather, as we shall see, a homo fictus or narrans ability. I will suggest that this ability can be enhanced through learning elements of the structure of narrativity and also through an adoption of the Metamodel (cf. Bandler & Grinder, 1975; Katan & Taibi, 2021) - all of which will help to further distinguish the human from the machine.