La traduzione nell’era dell'IA: nuovi ruoli, nuove competenze, nuova formazione

This article examines the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular Neural Machine Translation (NMT), on the translation industry. AI has the potential to simplify and increase productivity and the quality of work, but it also has the potential to marginalise human labour, creating conflicting attitudes towards the adoption of technologies. What is certain is that profound changes are taking place in the way we work, in the roles of language professionals and in the very concept of translation. The language service providers that are likely to thrive are those that can transform themselves into specialists who manage work processes, know how to use and control machines, and understand that AI needs language data to evolve. Professionals should also demonstrate to be conscious interlingual communicators with linguistic sensitivity, intercultural awareness and creativity. Translators are becoming post-editors, transcreators, language data managers, multilingual communication consultants for different media or trainers of non-professional translators. Post-editing has become a convergent activity with human translation, and translators and students are increasingly using NMT, often integrated with computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. Translation professionals are therefore required to understand the evolution, characteristics and types of NMT systems, their potential and limitations, and to know and deal with the different fields of activity that are emerging. This raises the question of whether the translation and language training offered by universities and schools is still adequate, or how they should embrace the challenge of updating their curricula and study programs to meet the needs of the market.