Istanbul Gelisim University IISBF SosyoCom: Monthly Events and News Bulletin (Issue: 66, June 2026)

Abstract

The Translator’s New Literacy: Translation Studies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Today, Translation and Interpreting Studies signify not merely the act of “transferring a text from one language into another, ” but a multilayered field of inquiry that requires technology, culture, discourse, ethical decisions, and human–AI interaction to be considered together. In particular, generative artificial intelligence, neural machine translation, and automatic quality assessment systems are making the translator’s working practices even more visible. Current studies show that post-editing is no longer limited to correcting errors in machine-generated output; rather, the translator has moved into the position of an expert who manages quality, monitors context, preserves terminology, and interprets the expectations of the target reader (Öner and Bengi, 2025). This transformation raises two fundamental questions for Departments of Translation and Interpreting Studies: What skills should the translator of the future possess, and how should translator training help students acquire these skills? Linguistic competence, cultural competence, and textual analysis skills in the classical sense remain indispensable. However, new competencies such as data literacy, prompt engineering, context-building, critical evaluation of AI-generated output, and awareness of ethical risks are now being added to them. Indeed, although artificial intelligence can produce fluent sentences, it cannot always accurately grasp the intention of a text, its ideological background, culture-based references, or generic function (Massey and Ehrensberger-Dow, 2025).