人工智能时代的文学翻译:挑战与机遇

Literary Translation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence:Challenges and Opportunities

在当前的翻译界和翻译理论界,谈论机器和人工智能翻译者大有人在,不少人对其可能带给人工译者的挑战倍感忧虑,认为传统的人工翻译迟早会被新兴的机器和人工智能翻译所取代。但是本文作者却对之抱有较为乐观的看法。本文作者认为,文学翻译需要极高的天赋,如果说文学翻译是一种跨文化、跨语言的再创造,那么理论的翻译在某种意义上也是一种跨文化、跨学科的再现、阐释和重构。一些独具理论创新特色和独特风格的人文学术大师的著述也是不可复制的,他们的理论在绝对意义上甚至是不可译的。优秀的译者只能在相对准确的层次上翻译其理论的基本意义,但其微妙且有争议的深层意义则无法用另一种语言准确地再现。因此就这一点而言,文学作品的人工翻译在未来仍将占有一席之地,文学翻译家的工作不会全然被机器和人工智能所取代。

In the current circles of translation theory and practice,quite a few translators and translation scholars talk enthusiastically about machine translation and artificial intelligence translation.Many of them are very much worried about the challenges they may bring to human translators.So,it is believed that traditional human translation will be replaced by the newly rising machine and artificial intelligence translation sooner or later.But the authors of this article are quite optimistic about it and believe that literary translation requires a high level of individual talent.If literary translation is regarded as a cross-cultural,cross-linguistic recreation,then theoretical translation is also a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary representation,interpretation and reconstruction.The works of some humanities masters with unique theoretical innovation and writing style cannot be copied,and their theories are even untranslatable in an absolute sense.A good translator can only translate the basic meaning of their theory with relative accuracy,but the subtle and controversial deep nuances cannot be represented accurately in another language.As such,human translators of literary works will still have a place in the future,and their work will not be entirely supplanted by machine and artificial intelligence translation.