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Human Translators and AI: A New Era of Collaboration
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What once seemed like science fiction is now a reality. What if a machine could translate an entire book in seconds, would human translators still matter?
From education and healthcare, to business and communication, AI is transforming the way people work and interact. Translation is no exception. AI-powered tools have introduced faster and more accessible multilingual communication, leading to significant changes in the way translation services are produced and delivered. But speed raises an important debate:
If machines can translate so efficiently, what happens to human translators?
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Is AI becoming a substitute for professional translators, or does it represent a collaborative tool that enhances their performance?
In order to explore these questions and to better understand the evolving relationship between AI and human translators, an interview was conducted with Mrs. Wehbé, translator, editor, proofreader, post-editor and a university instructor at ETIB, USJ. The purpose of this interview is to gather professional insights into the impact of AI on translation practices, its current limitations and the future of the profession.
Today, AI is having a high impact on all aspects of life, including translation. Many translators use AI-powered tools and have developed new skills such as post-editing, which involves reviewing and correcting machine-generated translations. Rather than replacing translators, AI should be viewed as a tool that complements and enhances their work. One reason is efficiency. Platforms such as Google Translate and DeepL use neural machine translation technology, which relies on AI networks to produce more natural and accurate translations. These systems can process large amounts of linguistic data and generate translations within seconds, making multilingual communication faster and more accessible than ever before. In addition, AI reduces costs and offer access to extensive databases and translation memories, making research and terminology management easier. AI also serves as a valuable assistant for professional translators. Modern translation software incorporates features such as translation memories, terminology databases, and automated quality checks. These tools help translators work more efficiently, maintain consistency, and manage large projects. As a result, the growing practice of post-editing machine-translated texts has created new opportunities for language professionals to collaborate with AI systems.
Yet translation is more than words. Despite its advantages, AI still has important limitations. Language is deeply connected to culture, context and human experience. During the interview, Mrs. Wehbé mentioned that AI systems may struggle to interpret idiomatic expressions, humor, emotions, and culturally specific references. Consequently, machine-generated translations may sometimes be inaccurate or fail to convey the intended meaning. This challenge becomes even more evident when translating between languages from different cultural backgrounds, as AI will not effectively handle cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions and contextual meaning. Idioms might be translated literally, making nonsense at all, which is one of the most serious mistakes in translation. Therefore, human translators remain essential for ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural sensitivity and effective communication. They do more than translate. They interpret. They adapt. They understand what is implied, not only what is written.
For Mrs. Wehbé, the future is not a battle between humans and machines. AI is here, that is a fact. We cannot live in denial. Instead, she believes translators should try to use it in their interest and find the best way to build a “healthy” relationship, where both parties can give their best. AI will not fully replace human translators in the future: language itself evolves over time. Without human translators, there will always be gaps and errors that can be “fatal” sometimes. According to her, human translators have wisdom, creativity, instinct, sensitivity, discernment, and good judgment. They have ethical values that they apply in their work. AI is not wise, nor instinctive, nor creative, nor sensitive. It processes data. It lacks all of these human qualities. Human translators are and will be on the loop, even when AI is involved. Language changes because people change, and that human dimension still matters.
As an instructor, Mrs. Wehbé advises her students to be up to date with all the developments in the translation field. She advises us to learn how to use AI-powered translation tools, to be open to progress, to invest in the future of translation as it is today, and to adapt our skills to the market needs.
In a nutshell, the question may no longer be whether AI will replace translators. The real question is: what kind of translators will the future require? As translation enters a new era, success will belong not to those who resist change, but to those who learn to work alongside it. Providing that technology may speak many languages, but understanding remains deeply human.
Mrs. Claude Wehbé Chalhoub is a translator, editor, proofreader, post-editor and a university instructor at ETIB, USJ. She has a PhD in translation. She is also the head of SIT (Service Interprétation et Traduction) at ETIB.