By Dr. Heba Salah
Senior Translator & Researcher
Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta
Every year on September 30, the world celebrates International Translation Day, a day dedicated to recognizing the people whose work allows ideas, knowledge, cultures, and human experiences to travel across linguistic boundaries. The United Nations formally recognized the day in 2017, highlighting the role of language professionals in connecting nations and fostering peace, understanding, and development. The date also commemorates St. Jerome, the scholar and translator traditionally regarded as the patron saint of translators.
Yet in 2026, celebrating translation inevitably means confronting a question that is reshaping the profession itself: What does it mean to translate in the age of artificial intelligence? The question is not simply whether machines can translate. They can, and increasingly well. The more important question is whether translation has ever been only about words. It has not.
Translation is about meaning. It is about context, intention, culture, emotion, memory, and the human experience embedded within language. It is about making oneself understood to someone who does not speak one’s language, while preserving something of what makes the original expression meaningful.
This is why the future of translation should not be framed simply as a contest between humans and machines. It should instead be understood as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between human creativity and the technology that human creativity has produced.
AI is a product of human creativity
There is a striking irony in the way we sometimes discuss artificial intelligence: we speak of it as though it arrived independently, rather than as one of the most remarkable products of human intelligence itself.
Human beings imagined intelligent machines. Human beings developed the mathematics, computer science, linguistics, engineering, and research behind them. Human beings designed the systems, created their applications, trained them, tested them, and continue to improve them. AI is, in this sense, a testimony to human creativity.
It would therefore be a mistake to see the rise of artificial intelligence only through the lens of replacement. A more constructive question is: How can human beings use a technology born from their own creativity to extend their ability to create, communicate, and understand?
For translators, this distinction is particularly important. AI can be an extraordinary tool. It can process large volumes of text, identify terminology, compare linguistic patterns, suggest alternative formulations, assist with research, and produce preliminary translations in a fraction of the time previously required.
These capabilities can make translation more accessible and efficient. They can also allow professional translators to spend more time on the tasks that require deeper judgment and expertise.
But a tool, however sophisticated, remains a tool. The challenge is not to prevent translators from using AI. It is to ensure that translators remain capable of using it intelligently.
A perfect sentence can still be a wrong translation
The greatest misunderstanding about translation is perhaps the assumption that accuracy is achieved simply by finding the correct equivalent for every word. Language does not work that way. A sentence may be grammatically flawless and still fail to communicate its intended meaning. A metaphor may lose its power when translated literally. A joke may depend on a cultural reference that has no equivalent in another language. A religious expression may carry centuries of theological and cultural associations that cannot be contained in a dictionary definition.Even a simple phrase can communicate something different depending on who says it, to whom, where, and under what circumstances. This is where the human translator enters the space between words.
The translator asks: What does the speaker actually mean? What is the intention behind this expression? What cultural context does the reader need? What emotion is being conveyed? Should the expression be translated literally, adapted, explained, or re-created? And perhaps most importantly: What must not be lost in translation?
These are not merely linguistic questions. They are questions of judgment. They are questions of interpretation. They are questions of human understanding. A machine may recognize that two expressions are linguistically similar. A human translator can recognize that they are not necessarily emotionally, culturally, or intellectually equivalent. This is why the translator’s role is not disappearing. It is changing.
From translator to interpreter of meaning
The translator of the future may spend less time simply transferring words from one language to another and more time evaluating, contextualizing, editing, and refining what technology produces. In this new environment, the translator becomes something more than a linguistic intermediary. The translator becomes a guardian of meaning. This role becomes especially important in fields where words carry consequences beyond the page.
Consider scientific translation, a translator must understand enough of the subject to recognize whether a technical term has been used correctly. Consider literary translation, the challenge is not simply to communicate what happened in the story, but to preserve voice, atmosphere, rhythm, irony, and emotion.Consider religious translation, words can carry layers of theological, historical, and cultural meaning. A translation that is linguistically smooth but contextually inaccurate can fundamentally alter how a concept is understood. Consider diplomacy and international communication, a subtle difference in tone can affect how a statement is interpreted by another government, institution, or community. In all these cases, the translator does more than transfer language. The translator interprets worlds.
Translation is more than a profession
Translation is certainly a profession. For many people, it is a career and a livelihood, and the economic dimension of the profession should not be overlooked. But reducing translation to a means of earning a living does not capture its deeper significance. Translation is also a human talent. It is one of the ways human beings overcome one of the most obvious barriers between us: the fact that we do not all speak the same language.A translator allows a scientific discovery to reach a new community. A translator allows a literary work to cross a border.A translator allows philosophical ideas to enter another intellectual tradition. A translator allows a religious or cultural text to be encountered by people who otherwise could not access it. A translator can bring people into conversation even when they do not share a common mother tongue.
The United Nations itself describes translation and other language professions as essential to communication, cooperation, cultural diversity, and the exchange of knowledge. Its work across six official languages is a practical reminder that multilingualism is not an obstacle to international cooperation; it is something that requires skilled human mediation. In this sense, translation is not simply about moving language. It is about moving knowledge and ideas. And sometimes, it is about moving feelings.
The books we read will shape the AI we manage
This brings us to perhaps the most important question: What should we teach the next generation?
If AI can generate a paragraph in seconds, should young people still spend years learning how to write? If machines can summarize books, should young people still read them? If AI can translate languages, should young people still study languages? The answer to all three questions is yes, but perhaps for a different reason than before.
The purpose of education in the age of AI cannot be simply to make human beings faster at doing what machines can already do. It must help human beings become better at doing what machines cannot decide for them. Young people need knowledge in order to evaluate information. They need language in order to recognize nuance. They need history in order to understand context. They need literature in order to understand human experience. They need philosophy in order to question assumptions. And they need books because deep reading develops something that cannot be reduced to instant information retrieval: the ability to stay with an idea long enough to understand it. The more powerful AI becomes, the more important this intellectual foundation will be. A young person who has never developed a strong relationship with language may be able to ask an AI system for a translation. But how will that person know whether the translation is faithful?
The future of translation, then, need not be a choice between the human translator and the machine. It can be a partnership. AI can perform repetitive tasks. The translator can make judgments.AI can process information. The translator can interpret context.AI can suggest possibilities. The translator can determine which possibility communicates the intended meaning. AI can increase speed. The translator can protect quality.
And when technology produces an answer that appears perfect, the human translator remains responsible for asking the most important question: Is it true to what the human being intended to say? That question cannot be outsourced entirely to a machine.
The future translator may therefore look different from the translator of the past. The profession will evolve, just as it has evolved with every major technological transformation—from dictionaries and typewriters to computers, translation memories, online databases, and now generative AI. But evolution does not necessarily mean disappearance. Sometimes it means discovering a new dimension of an old human skill.
