CFP JoSTrans 49 (Jan. 2028)

JoSTrans 49, January 2028

Call for papers for a special issue

Digital Patronage and the Politics of Translation in Algorithmic Culture

Guest-edited by Minlin Yu and Jenny He

In Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992:14), André Lefevere asks, “Who controls the ‘logic of the culture’?” The question resonates urgently in today’s digital environment. Building on Lefevere’s framework of patronage—the economic, ideological, and status forces that govern cultural production— this special issue of JoSTrans introduces the concept of “digital patronage” to analyse how these forces are reconfigured within contemporary “algorithmic culture” (Striphas, 2015). Algorithmic culture denotes conditions in which computational systems and processes increasingly mediate the production, circulation, and valuation of culture. Such mediation is far from neutral: it structures visibility, legitimacy, and cultural worth through the infrastructural operations of sorting and ranking. As Roland Barthes (1977) reminds us, culture is fundamentally ideological. Algorithmic mediation thus becomes the site where ideology is enacted, as digital infrastructures inscribe social values, norms, and power relations.

Algorithms do not operate in isolation. We propose “digital patronage” to describe the power exercised through sociotechnical systems, where platform architectures, data infrastructures and computational algorithms encode human design and biases, together conditioning how cultural meaning is generated, circulated, and recognised. Patronage is no longer confined to identifiable cultural actors such as editors, publishers or institutions. Instead, it is now increasingly embedded in the digital “black boxes” that orchestrate contemporary cultural landscape: large language models (LLMs) that mediate translation production, social media platforms that govern circulation, and translation management systems that allocate creative labour.

Following Pierre Bourdieu (1996), we conceptualise digital patronage as an algorithmic mechanism that wields symbolic power through evaluative, valuative and governmental force. Evaluative dispositions of dominant actors are encoded in sociotechnical systems. The systems, in turn, operationalise value by assigning legitimacy and quantifying cultural worth, thereby reinforcing and normalising social hierarchies. Once materialised in rankings, thresholds, and defaults, these valuations act back upon practice, organising conduct and acquiring a governmental character. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality as the “conduct of conduct” and Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns’ (2013) notion of algorithmic governmentality, digital patronage emerges as an automated, data-driven form of governance that modulates environments and narrows possibilities. It directs cultural labour by defining what counts as viable and efficient, while constraining permissible discourses through the pre-emptive shaping of what can be said, translated, and circulated. We argue that these evaluative, valuative, and governmental forces materialise through three sites in the modern translation ecology: generative patronage (model-based production), circulatory patronage (platform-based circulation), and managerial patronage (cloud-based workflow attribution). 

Generative Patronage  

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered LLMs has reshaped the landscape of translation. As these models become integrated across platforms and applications, they exert influence across stages from translation drafting to post-editing (PE), revision and quality assurance, blurring the traditional boundaries of authorship, agency and liability. This model-driven influence constitutes the logic of generative patronage. Generative patronage operates through valuative forces that are enacted across a model lifecycle: the curation of training data assigns value to certain sources and voices, the design of model architectures prioritises specific computational efficiencies and outcomes, and the refinement processes, such as RLHF, encode human preferences into normative judgments. In combination, these technical decisions embed cultural preferences, stereotypes, and biases into the sociotechnical system (Rozado, 2023; Moorkens, 2022).  

These embedded preferences and biases manifest in two forms. The first is demographic skew: white males are significantly overrepresented in training data (Statista, 2023), while women account for only one-fifth of AI professionals (EIGE, 2022). The second concerns linguistic and cultural imbalance: the predominance of English training and the overrepresentation of English-language data bias them towards “the cultural values of English speakers” (OpenAI, 2023). This raises questions: how are non-English cultures represented in “English-made” architectures? How do these systems reflect and reinforce inequalities in the creation, distribution, and valuation of knowledge with the Global South, where English is seldom the primary language of publication? Ultimately, the valuative mechanisms within LLMs become sources of evaluative and governmental power. Cultural preferences and biases are translated into operational criteria, encoding judgements of "correctness", "neutrality", and "appropriateness" that normalise particular ideological and stylistic positions. In human–AI collaboration, translators’ linguistic options are channelled by the model’s criteria, with outputs aligned with these positions made more visible and retrievable. In this way, generative patronage quietly governs translation practice by delimiting the boundaries of permissible discourse within the translated text.

Circulatory Patronage

Circulatory patronage in platform-based translation distribution is the second key site of digital patronage, where power operates through data infrastructures, recommendation algorithms, and interface design. These sociotechnical arrangements encode ideological priorities and regulate the circulation of cultural content (Rouvroy and Berns, 2013; Bucher, 2018). Through automated processes of classification, ranking, and recommendation, platforms shape patterns of visibility and sharing, thereby "conducting the conduct" of audiences and creators by pre-emptively shaping what is seen and shared. This governmental force carries significant ideological consequences, as seen in algorithmic biases that amplify specific political content: from the amplification of right-wing voices on X (The Guardian, 2021; The Verge, 2024) to the enforcement of state-approved narratives in DeepSeek (Reuters, 2025). Furthermore, platforms like Netflix leverage viewer data to inform algorithmic production, subsuming translation and localisation within a wider logic of data-driven storytelling.

Simultaneously, platforms exert an evaluative force by quantifying cultural attention. Their metrics, rankings, and recommendation algorithms operationalise value by reducing complex cultural works to measurable engagement indicators, allocating visibility based on calculated worth. These processes generate symbolic and reputational hierarchies that determine which translations, genres, or narratives are canonised and which are marginalised. Over time, such algorithmic valuations are naturalised as markers of legitimacy. As Tarleton Gillespie (2020:3) notes, classification is a "social and performative assertion," and platform-driven circulation becomes an act of rewriting that consecrates certain cultural norms. Translators and creators are consequently compelled to internalise these platform logics, developing an algorithmic habitus oriented towards anticipation, optimisation, and compliance within these systems of evaluation.

Managerial Patronage

Managerial Patronage constitutes a third site of digital patronage, where platform-mediated workflows quantify and datafy translation labour to automate decision-making and maximise efficiency. These platforms include networked measurement systems, reputational economies on crowdsourcing sites, and machine-learning-driven project management tools, exerting a governmental force. By automating workflows and distributing credit through data-driven metrics, they “conduct the conduct” of translators by structuring the conditions under which work is organised and performed. This infrastructural governance is both valuative and evaluative. It redefines professional worth through data including translation quality, timeliness of delivery, communication skills, and compliance with platform guidelines. Such redefinition is at odds with the artisan nature of the craft, where translation quality resists measurement, and any metric is likely reductive or incomplete (Drugan, 2013). Nevertheless, platforms institutionalise these reductive metrics through reputational scores, rankings, and visibility, reorganising the professional field around measurable outputs.

The consequence is a redefinition of translator agency. As assessment becomes embedded in the infrastructure, access to work and recognition become contingent on conformity to platform-defined benchmarks. In practice, this can encourage translators to internalise these criteria as practical constraints on their own conduct. Under such conditions, translators risk being reduced to numerical metrics (Moorkens, 2024), cogs in a machine (Moorkens, 2020; Webber, 1897), workers on an assembly line (Courtney and Phelan, 2019: 108), or “passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animals” (Mumford, 1966: 3). This dynamic exemplifies Langdon Winner’s (1977) concept of “reverse adaptation”, wherein technologies designed as means becomes ends in themselves, subordinating human expertise and creative integrity to technical constraints and ideological logics.

“Who controls ‘the logic of the culture’?” To address Lefevere’s question today, we must turn to digital patronage and the politics of translation in algorithmic culture. Examined across generative, circulatory, and managerial patronage, these sociotechnical systems emerge as neither  culturally nor gender neutral, nor value-free (Monzó-Nebot and Tasa-Fuster, 2024; Moorkens, Way and Lankford, 2024; Pym and Hao, 2024).  Rather, they institutionalise a political logic of cultural governance: generative patronage inscribes ideologies into the models that produce translation; circulatory patronage curates content visibility across platform infrastructures; and managerial patronage disciplines labour through cloud-based systems of quantification. These modalities of digital patronage generate, circulate, and regulate across the translation ecology, reshaping the conditions under which culture becomes intelligible and actionable in the digital age.   

This special issue, Digital Patronage and the Politics of Translation in Algorithmic Culture, invites contributions that critically explore how the modalities of patronage shape the practices of translation and rewriting, and thus the constitution of cultural meaning, within algorithmic culture.

 Topics may include but are not limited to: 

Generative Patronage 

1. AI co-authorship under generative patronage – attribution and authorship, ethics and responsibility in collaboration, creation and meaning-making processes.
2. Epistemic authority and creative latitude – how model outputs work as arbiters of ideologies such as “correctness”, “style”, and “neutrality” and how translators negotiate deviation from model outputs.
3. Human post-editing under model constraint – how translators’ PE are influenced by model-generated drafts and embedded evaluative preferences.
4. Bias as "feature" in model-mediated translation – how demographic, gender, cultural, and political skews embedded in training data and alignment processes surface as tendencies in translation outputs.
5. Prompt and instruction design in translation – how prompts and interface can be designed to resist or reconfigure the valuative, evaluative and governmental forces of patronage.

Circulatory Patronage

6. Cultural rewriting under digital mediation under circulatory patronage – how algorithms and platforms reframe literary, cinematic, or aesthetic values through translation and circulation. 
7. Digital translation as soft power – global flows of translated content (e.g., K-dramas, C-dramas, anime) as instruments of cultural diplomacy, platform branding.
8. Platform aesthetics and narrative design – how data-driven translation and localisation affect genres, pacing, humour, and emotional tone. 
9. Ideological translation and digital mediation – how algorithms reinforce or challenge dominant cultural, political, or social narratives. 
10. Transnational circulation of cultural icons – how platforms and digital patronage transform the visibility and adaptation of literary or media figures across borders. 
11. Affective translation economies – how fan translators, influencers, or subtitlers create emotional attachment and symbolic capital within platform ecosystems. 
12. Censorship, moderation, and moral governance – institutional or platform control over transnational translation flows 

Managerial Patronage

13. Metric design and professional judgement – how platform-defined indicators of “quality”, “efficiency”, and “reliability” displace or recalibrate translators’ professional standards.
14. Visibility as managerial control – how dashboards, performance histories, and comparative rankings shape translators’ self-presentation, risk-taking, and task selection.
15. Reverse adaptation in practice – how translators adapt their working methods, stylistic choices, and professional identities to fit platform logics.
16. Negotiating quantification – how translators subvert, adapt to, or "game" metricised systems in order to sustain agency and quality norms.
17. Ethics of algorithmic management – how fairness, transparency, and accountability are negotiated or obscured within platform-based governance of translation labour.

Guest editors

Dr Minlin Yu is a Lecturer in Translation Studies with Mandarin Chinese at the University of Glasgow. She convenes and teaches courses including Translation of Literature and Culture and Advanced Translation Language Study, co-teaches Literary Translation, and previously delivered Intermediate Mandarin Chinese. She completed her PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow and holds an MSc from the University of Edinburgh. Fascinated by questions of gender, culture, translation, and technology, she situates her research interdisciplinarily across these areas. Her doctoral project examines the translation/ construction of gender roles and identities across a century of Chinese cultural history. Her current research extends to address gender and cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) used as machine translation (MT) systems. 

Jenny He is a third-year postgraduate researcher in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research expands André Lefevere’s theory of rewriting to examine algorithmic rewriting, digital patronage, and platform poetics on Chinese social media and e-commerce platforms. Focusing on search and recommendation systems, her work analyses how platform logic and state ideology shape the canonisation of English novels in the Chinese digital marketplace, and how this content intersects with contemporary Chinese government discourses on marriage and fertility within a postfeminist neoliberal economy. Jenny holds a BA in Drama and English from the University of Bristol and an MA in Translation from London Metropolitan University. She previously lived and worked in China for four years, including a period of study at Nanjing University, and writes for literary publications including Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, and Tears in the Fence.

Key Milestones & Deadlines

Date	Milestone
31 March 2026	Deadline for Abstract Submissions
30 April 2026	Notification of Abstract Acceptance
31 October 2026	Deadline for Submission of Full Articles
28 February 2027	Completion of Peer Review & Notification of Provisional Acceptance
30 April 2027	Deadline for Authors to Return Revised Articles
31 May 2027	Final Editorial Decisions (Final accept/reject)
30 June 2027	Editors Submit Finalised Special Issue to Journal (Formatted and copy-edited)
July-December 2027	Journal Production
January 2028	Expected Publication

Practical information and deadlines

Proposals: Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words in English, to the JoSTrans platform: Submissions | The Journal of Specialised Translation (jostrans.org)

Authors are requested to use APA 7th. For the final accepted versions of papers authors adhere to the Jostrans submission preparation style sheet.