The art of literary translation exposes the limits of AI
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For centuries, people have dreamed of undoing Babel.
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Sci-fi novelists envisioned universal translators, and linguists devised international languages, all in pursuit of a world where one person could speak and another could understand, regardless of where either was born.
Artificial intelligence appears to be taking humanity one step closer toward that goal.
AI-powered tools are already being widely used by lawyers to translate legal documents from one language to the next. The mass market romance publisher Harlequin has turned to AI to translate its novels for international audiences. And hospitals are deploying AI translation to communicate directly with patients in multiple languages.
The speed and skill with which these AI-powered translation tools operate are certainly impressive.
But there is an important frontier for translation technology, one that it might never be able to breach: the poem.
That’s because translating poetry, thus far, has been a uniquely human experience. It demands intimate knowledge of two languages, which large language models certainly possess. But it also requires a mastery of different cultures and perspectives, what literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a “worlding” of language and culture.
Pushing the limits of language
When scholars have studied the creativity of chatbots by prompting them to produce poetry, they’ve noticed that the poems tend to be more homogeneous and standardised than those written by humans.
Chatbots’ poetry translations have similar issues.
AI seems to struggle in...