Or at least, I haven’t yet found a good reason to do so in my work as a scholarly translator.
I’m open to new technologies—especially ones that can enhance my accuracy and ease the burden of tedious tasks, so that I can focus on creating. My translation software, for example, does all of these things. I can’t imagine completing my early drafts without it! (I use memoQ; other translators use Trados, Wordfast, or others) I don’t use all of the software’s features, but I pick and choose what’s useful to me. These include text segmentation (so I can work on one screen, with my source and target texts neatly aligned), building translation memories and term bases, and the option to type frequently used terms or proper names with just one or two keystrokes.
I’ve yet to identify such benefits with artificial intelligence—although Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and (yes) also the translation software providers seem to be doing all they can to foist AI upon us. The leader of a workshop I once attended compared AI to a somewhat sloppy personal assistant; it can get a lot done, but you must always check its work. And in the end, I don’t need that kind of “assistance”—certainly not in the act of translation itself, but also not in my background research, bibliography creation, or other such tasks that might be tempting to automate.
Translating a book is writing a book. It means immersing yourself in a new subject area, intimately getting to know another author’s style, finding creative solutions to relay this style in a different language, rewriting over and over, and engaging in collaborative dialogue to get the details and nuances just right. It’s a longer-term process that can’t be outsourced. Most of the books I translate are the product of years, or even decades, of original scholarship. They would have been impossible to compose with AI. Why should their translations be any different?
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Image credit: axelle b, CC0 1.0 <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>, via https://www.publicdomainpictures.net
