At the end of 2018, the French minister for Higher Education and Research launched a call for proposals on the translation of texts in social science and humanities [SSH], with the aim of “contributing to the international visibility of French academic research” The objective was to create further dialogue around the recent interest in using machine translation (MT) in the dissemination of scientific research. The Transiens project was among the successful candidates in this innovative call.

Based on the reflections raised during workshops that brought together researchers, professional translators specialised in SSH, librarians, and representatives of academic journals and scientific publishing platforms, the Transiens project revealed the precious know-how of professional translators on the subject, highlighted the inherent problems pertaining to MT when applied to the SSH, notably in a multilingual perspective, and gave nuance to its advantages (including financial) if it were systematised to disseminate SSH articles published in academic journals.As a result of these findings, instead of continuously producing low-quality articles through MT, read by only a few, the Transiens project provides a framework for translation experts in the SSH to closely work with academic open-access journals and create multilingual syntheses of their articles, helping to disseminate the content of the most recently published researches and thus facilitate transnational exchanges between researchers.

The Transiens project is specifically directed towards open-access academic journals, whatever their discipline, language or nationality, and concerned with respecting both the scientific quality of SSH articles and the controlled efficiency of their dissemination abroad. This simple protocol is founded on the cooperation of a transnational network of open-access journals and a team of professional translators specialised in the SSH, and its two pillars are: multilingualism on the one hand, and synthesis writing on the other.

More about Transiens: https://transiensproject.wordpress.com/.