{"id":282001,"date":"2026-06-25T08:34:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T20:05:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T00:05:32","slug":"the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of literary translation exposes the limits of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai-282955\">The art of literary translation exposes the limits of AI<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai-282955\">https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai-282955<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-06-25 08:34:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"theconversation.com\">theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For centuries, people have dreamed of undoing Babel.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Artificial intelligence appears to be taking humanity one step closer toward that goal.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The speed and skill with which these AI-powered translation tools operate are certainly impressive.<\/p>\n<p>But there is an important frontier for translation technology, one that it might never be able to breach: the poem. <\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s 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 \u201cworlding\u201d of language and culture. <\/p>\n<h2>Pushing the limits of language<\/h2>\n<p>When scholars have studied the creativity of chatbots by prompting them to produce poetry, they\u2019ve noticed that the poems tend to be more homogeneous and standardized than those written by humans.<\/p>\n<p>Chatbots\u2019 poetry translations have similar issues. <\/p>\n<p>AI seems to struggle in three main areas: rendering metaphor, decoding complex sentence structure and creatively conveying mood or emotion.<\/p>\n<p>To demonstrate these flaws, I worked closely with Adeeba Shahid Talukder, an award-winning poet and translator, to write this piece and to translate the 1953 poem \u201cMul\u0101q\u0101t,\u201d or \u201cMeeting,\u201d composed by one of the most famous Urdu poets of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz.<\/p>\n<p>          &#8230;<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai-282955\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The art of literary translation exposes the limits of AI https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-art-of-literary-translation-exposes-the-limits-of-ai-282955 Publish Date: 2026-06-25 08:34:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":282002,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/743398\/original\/file-20260622-57-48krm.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C1271%2C5109%2C2554&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-282001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282001"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282003,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282001\/revisions\/282003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}