We live in an era when many professionals are losing their former monopoly to machines due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with translation being one of the most affected professions. The associated challenges for translators are profound. And yet, if we understand this change correctly, it can also bring benefits — especially for translators of literary texts.
As the market becomes increasingly flooded with automated, superficial, and low-quality translations, publishers may look for ways to signal to readers that their books are of genuine quality. One possibility is that translators will become personalities whose names and short biographies appear on book covers as a way to emphasize that a skilled and respected translator stands behind the text.
AI tools can also allow professional translators to work with texts more efficiently, with higher quality, and more creatively. Literary translators could get opportunities to participate in the human translation of a work that the machine has pre-translated in their style.
The real threat is not the technology itself, which can make hundreds of thousands of books available to readers all over the world. More access to more resources cannot harm us.
The real danger of AI lies in its implementation on social media and in the education system. As people consume more short-form content, attention spans shorten, as well. As people become more glued to their smartphone screens, they spend less time reading books. In that, I see the greatest challenge of the future. As language professionals, we must work to ensure that there will still be someone who reads.
We are also harmed by the aggressiveness of technology companies that have convinced the masses that their machine translation (MT) engines are almost perfect and that human translators are merely metaphorical makeup artists who smooth out the wrinkles on the real actors. In reality, translators are the actors — conveying the play written by the playwright — and the editor is the director.
Finally, history shows that no one wins when translators reject new technology outright. When computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools and translation memories (TMs) emerged years ago, part of the community of experienced translators rebelled, failing to understand that ignoring a technology that could help them would not guarantee that their rates would stop falling. The same resistance reappeared with the rise of MT and post-editing. Today, post-editing has become an everyday reality. While it’s true that MT is becoming better thanks to human translations, it will never replace humans when it comes to stylistic choice and quality assurance.
The literary translation field is at a crossroads. The path of blind ignorance about AI will bring more low-quality, machine-translated literature and a new kind of translator — a mere makeup artist — who often lacks formal education in translation studies. However, the path of strong resistance — based on rejecting AI — will ultimately lead to the same outcome, because technology companies will always find a way. I believe the best path is that of cooperation with technology — a balanced approach that embraces the benefits of AI while valuing the expertise of translation professionals.
