academy

The Translation and Interpreting degree at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is one of the most prestigious in Spain, thanks to its own faculty, the number of languages offered, and its history. However, every leader in its category must consider what threatens it beyond its natural competition. And in the case of the Sciences of Translation and Interpreting, the threat is technological: machine translation and Artificial Intelligence. Are we really facing a profession with no future? How can we turn around the discourse that translation will become useless because of AI?

After working closely with key people from the faculty and the degree program, the conclusion was obvious, fascinating, and literarily beautiful: there is always a part of the message that is lost in translation. While software focuses on translating words, it does not focus on translating contexts. Languages can be replaced, but cultures cannot. And that is where a person trained in Translation and Interpreting not only has work for years to come, but it is an essential job.

Just think of international mediators or the hard-working translators who leave us translator’s notes at the bottom of the page: cultural context is key to understanding the language that produced it.

The key was not to position itself on the best technical content or the highest number of languages (in which the degree is already a leader anyway), but as a trainer of cultural mediators for all types of sectors: for politics, for business, for export, for video games and, of course, for culture itself in all its forms, both literary and audiovisual.

This fact crystallized into a new narrative and a new way of explaining the degree and, almost by extension, an academic discipline.

This rebranding involved changing the name of some subjects to align them with this common vision and, taking advantage of the change, giving better visibility to the possible itineraries.

And although all university degrees seem like a univocal path forward, the Degree in Translation and Interpretation is, from the first minute, a tree that bifurcates and can take its students through 40 unique itineraries according to the languages they choose.

The truth is that although I have always been very critical of my studies at the university, l’Autònoma, my alma mater, always brings me joy. It is not only my degree, it is also my master’s degree, my first teaching opportunity in higher education and now, also, one of my first projects as a freelance, with the opportunity to be in contact with outstanding people from the humanities, the privilege of learning from them and the possibility of combining narrative and brand architecture in a complex project.