Hypertransterpretation in Hyperreality: the Future of Translation and Interpretation in Distributed Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the future of natural language translation and interpretation (T & I) in the broadband telecommunications environment that is likely to emerge over the next twenty years. The relationship between T & I and information technology (IT) was first recognized in the researcher's earlier work (O'Hagan, 1990) which was further developed into the concept of distributed T & I called teletranslation (O'Haqan, 1996a). Since 1990 the Internet has emerged as an infrastructure technology permitting the extensive development of teletranslation, however, in its first decade of development the Internet has essentially been a medium for text and this has limited the development of teleinterpretation. This research addresses T & I in the next phase of infrastructure development; so called "superhighways" promise to deliver more bandwidth and processing speed which will facilitate teleinterpretation. The new environment will also permit the development of distributed virtual reality (VR) and the possibility of people meeting as telepresences in VR. The present research takes the case of a particular form of distributed VR called HyperReality (HR) (Terashima, 1995a, 1995b) which has been under development in Japan since the mid-1980s. There is a programme of development for HR as an infrastructural technology to 2025 and other researchers are looking into possible applications. This makes it possible to consider the future of T & I in a series of future scenarios based upon a developing technological paradigm. The study suggests that HR as a medium will privilege a hybrid form of T & I first described by Ashworth (1997) as transterpreting. However, beside reflecting the convergence of T & I, HR enables the integration of articulated nonverbal communication (NVC) and context, machine translation (MT), machine interpretation (MI) and artificial intelligence (AI) and suggests a new paradigm of T & I that the researcher calls hypertransterpretation.