| The study of media, culture and communication has undergone a theoretical and methodological turn towards "materiality." The turn places emphasis on the physical forms and material channels of inscription and transmission, rather than the "disembodied" referents or contents of language. While language would seem to have been well accounted for in these materialist frameworks, it nevertheless sits uneasily within such discourses. This study engages this discordance by (1) tracing its conceptual history and (2) through a detailed symptomatic reading, the focus of which is software and systems developed for the automatic translation of natural languages: Machine Translation (MT).;The dissertation contains six chapters, the first three forming a theoretical framework focused on the concepts of materiality, translation and code, and the second three on an analysis of MT. Chapter One traces the deployments of 'materiality' and 'materialism' as they sediment around treatments of language in cultural and media theory. Chapter Two extends the interrogation of materiality to translation, emphasizing how it is handled within "media materialist" outlooks (McLuhan, Kittler), then discussing how materiality is reflected in translation studies research. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between languages---materially conceived---and machine code, programming languages, as well as "universal" code, in light of Information Theory as a basis for human coding activities. The fourth chapter recontextualizes Warren Weaver's 1949 "Translation" Memorandum as founding document of MT and focal point for skepticism regarding the automatic translation of "natural" languages. Chapter five adopts a Kittlerian stance to historically orient the development and operation of a wide range of real-world MT applications, and demonstrate how multi-language "data" is processed through commercial, military and increasingly public, statistically-defined channels. Chapter Six considers the implications of competing materialities of language in light of progressively ubiquitous MT.;Three key concerns are emphasized throughout this analysis, each of which threaten, in different moments and configurations, to unsettle the materiality of language: (1) translatability, particularly of a "universal" type that comes to be articulated in media studies; (2) "human" language as an essential, natural and holistic notion, and (3) materiality itself, as operationalized differently across disciplines, with different objectives. |
