Mediating person-to-person and culture-to-culture, translation and interpretation extend beyond mere conversion of language: they represent creative and imaginative practices that connect disparate worlds. Yet in a contemporary moment where generative AI traverses language with overwhelming speed and “precision”—a moment where, in the name of efficiency, we move to do away with fundamentally human qualities—human-led translation faces existential threat.
As a group of translators and interpreters specialized in the arts, Art Translators Collective now enters its second decade. In this program, they boldly proclaim a “funeral” for human translation, using performances, workshops, paintings, and other original works to harness creative and imaginative power for a vocation whose future is made visible only by confronting its end.
Is this the death of translation? Or might this project’s question reach further still? Expanding beyond translation and addressed to all of humanity, it reconsiders the meaning and value of every form of human creative activity: its mistakes, slippages, hesitations—the very essence of imperfection.