AI Literacy: The concept of suitability and core translation skills

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 reignited the debate on the future of the
translation profession and, consequently, on how translator training programmes
should change and adapt. Similar to discussions that occurred with the
 introduction of neural machine translation a few years earlier, some argued that core
translation skills, such as language knowledge, translation ability and cultural expertise
that have long been essential components of many translator training programmes,
had now been rendered obsolete by the arrival of generative AI (GenAI).

Inspired by the concept of machine translation literacy, a case will be made that
these core skills (together with some other complementary skills, such as selection
and assessment) are absolutely essential in order to ascertain whether the content
produced by GenAI tools is not simply accurate or inaccurate, but, more
importantly, suitable for the requirements of any given translation project, as specified
in the relevant translation brief.

Examples will be given of specific AI-based tasks (such as translation of content,
 terminology extraction, multilingual glossary creation and machine translation
 postediting) in which the suitability of the results cannot be determined without
recourse to so-called traditional core translation skills.