Longread: Alice in Machine Translation Land
In the sometimes heavily emotional discussion about machine translation, professional translators end up by agreeing that machine translation eventually will take on tasks. They believe that translation engines will take over a tiny amount of work that is now being done by people. But these translators immediately add that there will always be fields and specialisms that cannot be replaced by machines. One of those is literary translations.
But… is that really the case? If robots are even taking over real human tasks like caring, why shouldn’t they replace specific translation tasks as well? In this article I discuss the results of literary translations using a machine.