Artificial intelligence and its role in translation of fiction from the viewpoint of six female Slovak literary translators – yea or nay?

Abstract

Over the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become an inseparable part of translation studies. Works on the role of AI in the translation process (Moorkens et al., 2018; Youdale, 2020; Shahmerdanova, 2025), the future of translation in the AI era (Zanaty, 2024; Ye, 2024), AI in education (Yu & Lu, 2021; Chen, 2024) and many other such topics have been published. It is particularly interesting to see whether and how AI is used in translation of literary texts, as it is a highly creative process (Hadley et al., 2022) that cannot rely on generic answers. When it comes to less widely-spoken languages like Slovak, the use of neural machine translators might not facilitate the process: on the contrary, it might complicate it. The study maps, from a sociological viewpoint, attitudes towards, opinions about, and the experiences of neural machine translators and generative chatbots in literary translation drawn from a sample of professional literary translators. In the first phase of our explorative qualitative research (using a focus group method) we present the results related to the use or non-use of AI-driven tools in literary translation from foreign languages to Slovak, the influence of machine translators on the translation process, and the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation from the viewpoint of professional translators. Since there has not been any similar research conducted in Slovak academic milieux, we believe that our results provide at least a partial view of potential advantages, disadvantages, and problematic aspects of AI in literary translation from the viewpoint of professionals, including recommendations for good practice.