You Sneak the Human Back in: Automatic Translation Technologies and the Pursuit of Meaningful Creative Work in Professional Translation

Abstract

This paper investigates how automatic translation (AT) technologies, including neural machine translation (NMT) and Gen-AI (e.g., ChatGPT), are reshaping the creative agency and professional identity of translators. While prior research has explored the impact of automation on translation quality and labor conditions, little attention has been paid to how it reconfigures translation as meaningful creative work. We draw on 110 narrative interviews with professionally trained translators across Europe. Findings show that AT promotes a utilitarian ‘value-for-art-extraction’ model, instrumentalizing creativity for speed, efficiency, and market demands. Yet, translators reassert their agency, creative authorship, and professional values through four interrelated mechanisms that foreground the relational nature of creative work. Rather than pursuing creativity as pure ‘art-for-art's-sake’, translators exercise aesthetic and interpretive judgment through socially embedded engagements with clients, communities, and technologies. These mechanisms include: (1) working closely with clients to tailor translations to communicative and cultural contexts through a distinctly human touch; (2) engaging in human–machine co-creation that enhances, rather than replaces, human input; (3) transforming post-editing tasks, often dismissed as scum work, into sites of interpretive and creative control; and (4) participating in professional communities of practice where ethical and creative strategies are collectively developed. These relational practices position AT as tools that complement and expand, rather than diminish, the aesthetic and interpretative autonomy of translators’, reaffirming translation as a human-centered meaningful creative work.