After almost two years of talking about artificial intelligence (AI), what it does, how we can use it, and where it will lead us, we are now seeing that talk translate into action, with businesses and governments exploring the implementation of unsupervised AI, including for translation and interpreting. We’ve warned against it, and now we are starting to see the effects. Whether it is mistranslation causing the unjustified rejection of asylum claims or the unfortunate death of a teenager due to multilingual staff using Google Translate to navigate monolingual allergy training, there are many use cases where AI is simply not fit for purpose. We have recently produced our first position paper on AI interpreting in response to our colleagues at JTP in the Czech Republic alerting us to the government’s intention to fully replace interpreters with unsupervised AI interpreting. JTP have done all in their power to warn the government, and we wait to see whether they have heard us.
The articles in this issue of Translatio reflect these concerns affecting us all. The creative work we do is still beyond the scope of artificial intelligence, which is still only good at a very narrow range of skills. Human creativity and human-created content will always be highly valued, and this value is reflected in the number of events and activities, such as those by ACTI, OTTIAQ, ACTTI, AMETLI, ANTIO, and CTPCBA, focusing on the creative, the human, and more importantly, encouraging future generations. Both AMETLI in Mexico and ASTRA in Senegal are supporting new professionals through workshops and mentoring offering guidance from experienced practitioners.
The critical issues on AI implementation as they affect translators, interpreters, and terminologists are nicely summed up in the position paper SFT have also published clearly identifying the areas of real concern. It outlines that the value of human creativity, expertise and human agency cannot be underestimated. There are also clear concerns around the importance of being able to distinguish between human- and AI-generated content. Moreover, professional rates and working conditions are under pressure from AI implementation, and this pressure threatens the future sustainability of our profession. Most worryingly, the AI hype is putting students off studying languages in general and translation, interpreting, and terminology in particular. This is yet another existential threat.
It is not a coincidence that this year’s theme for International Translation Day is ‘Translation, an art worth protecting’. Addressing these concerns together is essential in protecting our longevity.
In keeping with the copyright theme, it is fitting that the XXIII FIT World Congress (4–6 September 2025) will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations leading the development of a balanced and effective global intellectual property system. As a partner UN agency, WIPO is committed to multilingualism and provides interpreting services for its meetings, the WIPO Pearl 10-language terminology database, and the WIPO Translate neural machine translation (NMT) tool.
I am pleased to highlight that the call for papers for the XXIII FIT World Congress has been released and that the call for nominations for the prestigious FIT Awards for 2025 will be open until 16 November 2024. You can find more information about these awards and how to submit a nomination here.
We look forward to seeing you all in Geneva in September 2025, and on behalf of FIT Council, I wish you all a very, very happy International Translation Day.
Alison Rodriguez, president@fit-ift.org