I've been thinking about this whole doom and gloom "AI will replace us all" in translation space a lot. The thing is, for literary translation, MTPE(machine translation post editing) and its replacement, AITPE, doesn't work.
It doesn't work because translation is a creative process.
When AI translates a text, it will find the most common-denominator way of flipping a sentence into another language. Essentially it tries its best not to be wrong. It is going to be wrong anyway, some of the time, especially when a sentence gets long. All the poetic prose in the original gets flattened out. In a way, it is WORSE than plain old machine translation.
And then it goes to a translator for the post-editing.
And the translator gets to look at dead prose. And fix it. This is not a creative (+) process, it's a subtractive (-) process. This is bad for your brain, and bad for the creative process. Once those words and how the AI translates are stuck in your head, it's hard to think of something else to replace it. And agencies who wants AITPE don't want you to replace it, they want you to correct any mistakes and make it readable. So the longer you do it, the more ingrained the "safe" way to translate gets stuck in your head, and you go into this doom loop where the prose just gets flatter.
And when the text goes to the reader, it feels flat and lifeless. Translated work is then in turn devalued, and less work gets translated. Another doom loop.
Seriously just don't do it.
