Try new app, Translalia, to experiment with using LLMs for poetry translation.
Saturday, 13 June 2026, 9.30am to 11am
Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased, error-prone, and bad for the environment; they reinforce the dominance of English and generate large amounts of terrible writing; and they are associated with a simplistic, functional conception of translation. But they can also represent language variety in unprecedentedly fluid ways, and enable new kinds of translational creativity. We are developing an app, Translalia, to support this sort of translational interaction with LLMs. Join us to try it out, share your views, and more generally explore how AI might change translation for the better as well as the worse.
Please bring a laptop and a short text you'd like to work with.
Professor Matthew Reynolds is interested in how literature germinates between and crosses languages, and in translation as a creative process, especially as it involves Italian, French, Latin and Greek and the many languages of English. He founded the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT) and the associated Masters in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation. Some of his books are: the open access Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (2023) which includes interactive digital elements; Prismatic Translation (2019), Translation: A Very Short Introduction (2016), The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue (2011), Likenesses (2013) The Realms of Verse (2001), and the novels Designs for a Happy Home (2009) and The World Was All Before Them (2013). He is currently leading a collaborative research investigation into 'AI, Decoloniality and Creative Poetry Translation' and developing an app, Translalia, to support creative, ethically reflective translation through language(s) in dialogue with AI tools.
Dr Joseph Hankinson studied English at Balliol College, completing his DPhil in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Matthew Reynolds. His research connects the writing of the long nineteenth century to its global contexts, both in terms of the influence of specifically tropical regions and people on nineteenth-century literature, and in terms of that literature's global afterlives. His first book, Relational Worlds: Kojo Laing, Robert Browning, and Affiliative Literature (2023), exemplified these interests by tracing vital affiliations between nineteenth-century British poetry and its (broadly-conceived) tropical reception. It has been reviewed in Victorian Poetry and in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He has published widely on relations between tropical and non-tropical imaginative worlds, as well as on the cross-temporal imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, with articles appearing and forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, Style, Essays in Criticism, Mosaic, Journal of Cultural Research, and elsewhere. He is a postdoc on the 'AI, Decoloniality and Creative Poetry Translation' project.
Speaker(s): Professor Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford), Dr Joseph Hankinson (University of Oxford)
Series: OCCT
Venue:
St Anne's College
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Woodstock Road Oxford
Department: English (Department)
Organiser: OCCT
Host: OCCT
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/translalia-translation-in-dialogue-with-ai-tickets-1990101048809?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true