We all know that artificial intelligence (AI) is rising at a very fast pace. What do you think this will bring to translators and interpreters, as well as the entire industry in the future? Do you see it as more of a challenge or more of an opportunity?

I think it’s a bit of both, to be quite fair. I have heard disturbing news that within the next five years we will no longer be able to call ourselves translators, because that job will be completely taken by machines. Some pundits and some people say that’s true. I’m not quite convinced because five years ago we had very similar stories as well, but things haven’t changed tremendously.

But I have seen some compelling evidence of good machine translation, neural machine translation and that AI is making great steps forward. However, I think we should not forget the human factor, and that’s an essential thing in translation. People have said that we can’t call ourselves translators and that we may have to create a new term for ourselves, maybe call ourselves post-editors, revisers, reviewers and somebody has even suggested cleaners who are cleaning up a text. As the president of the FIT, I would not like to be called “President of the International Federation of Cleaners” at some stage during my mandate. I believe that the human element is so important in every phase of translation, and even if machines can provide a raw translation, it still needs to be tidied and cleaned up if you will. That’s something that we can certainly do.

And then there is high-end translation. For example, would you accept having your leg amputated because somebody read that from your medical notes which have been translated by a machine? You wouldn’t trust whether it was correct or not, and I think the essential thing to keep in mind with machines is that their work will need to be read by humans and so you will still need the human element for a long time to come. I think there’s no way that machines can actually assure the quality of the translations they themselves provide. So human translators will need to be involved in some way or other.

I can’t predict the future and I don’t think the people who are predicting the future at the moment are doing a particularly good job either. But I think we need to be positive. We also need to embrace technology as we have done so for many years, so all this is nothing new, but the pace in which AI is developing is certainly very quick. can be “trained” to translate word for word, or to find the same concepts, but I think human understanding is infinitely clever. We can actually do a lot more than machines at present, and I certainly believe that emotions, ambiguity and expressions of love will be hard to replicate. I’m not sure whether I want to hear all these from a computer, and I think ambiguity really is where we can shine as humans. For this reason I think that literary translation will be one of the last bastions to fall. A computer capable of translating the works of Shakespeare into perfect Chinese, for example, I think we’ve still got a long way to go before that happens.