As AI-powered machine translation becomes increasingly sophisticated, accelerating “cultural exchange across languages” (ADHO), critical questions emerge about the role of human translators in scholarly communication and pedagogy. This online workshop takes the Programming Historian (https://programminghistorian.org) – a multilingual, open peer-review publisher of digital humanities lessons in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French – as a case study for examining how human cultural and domain expertise remains essential for creating culturally situated and pedagogically effective learning resources for DHs scholarship.

This four-hour workshop welcomes digital humanists interested in multilingual digital pedagogy, collaborative publishing, translation studies, and critical engagement with DH scholarly communication. We seek registration of up to 20 participants – from newcomers to more experienced practitioners – interested in translating DH pedagogical resources drawn from the Programming Historian into any language.

Participants will gain practical skills in translating pedagogical resources for DH scholarship by developing their own draft translation of a Programming Historian lesson. They will navigate challenges that remain beyond automatic translation systems, including adapting examples to different regional teaching, research, and cultural contexts; navigating regional variations in tools and dataset availability; and making methodological decisions that respect cultural and disciplinary specificities. Participants may then submit their translation to the journal or adapt it for other venues.

This workshop begins with an introduction to the Programming Historian and its editorial and translation policies, discussing the advantages and limitations of various approaches: from literal translations to adapted translations that rework the structure, tools, datasets, or historical content of the original lesson for new linguistic contexts (Isasi and Rojas 2021). We will explore strategies our teams have developed to address translinguistic challenges (Marques et al 2023; Gille Levenson et al. 2024) to examine how translators navigate situations where digitized materials or computational tools differ across regions, requiring human judgement about audience needs, technical feasibility, and research relevance. These translation choices illuminate what recent scholarship has identified as the politics of DH infrastructure, where instructors, researchers, and translators must actively work to mitigate linguistic and cultural inequalities built into digital infrastructures, tools, and datasets — inequalities that automated systems for translation would likely reproduce (Gille Levenson et al. 2024; Isasi / Rojas Castro 2021; and Crymble / Afanador-Llach 2021; Marques et al 2023; Alves 2021).

The second half of the workshop is dedicated to hands-on collaborative work. Participants will work in small groups to develop translation projects by browsing through the Programming Historian’s translation concordance (https://programminghistorian.org/translation-concordance), and choosing a lesson to translate. Programming Historian team members will provide support in a welcoming environment, facilitating collaboration and answering questions on how to navigate the journal’s guidelines, lessons, and open-access protocols.

This workshop directly engages with critical questions: as AI-driven translation (re)shapes translingual practice, what possibilities and challenges emerge for publishing and pedagogical practices in DH? (ADHO) By foregrounding human collaboration, interpretive decision-making, cultural awareness, and attention to power dynamics in knowledge production, we will demonstrate why and how human translators remain essential actors in creating equitable, high-quality, multilingual DH resources.