From Machine Translation to Human–AI Collaboration: Translator Roles and Responsibilities in Chinese and English-Language Scholarship, 2016–2026
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61360/BoniGHSSAH262020660102Keywords:
generative artificial intelligence, translator agency, translation ethics, post-editing, human–AI collaborationAbstract
Generative artificial intelligence is recasting translation as a form of mediated production, yet discussions of what translators are responsible for remain dispersed across technical, pedagogical, professional and ethical literatures. This study maps the development of that discussion through a comparative bibliometric analysis of 447 CNKI records and 303 Web of Science records published between 2016 and 2026. The corpus was assembled from database exports, manually screened, corrected for an Early Access/final-version duplicate, and analysed through publication counts, standardized keyword frequencies, keyword co-occurrence and period-based thematic prevalence. Publication output rose sharply after 2022 in both databases. Chinese-language scholarship gives greater prominence to post-editing, translator subjectivity, human–AI collaboration and translation ethics, whereas the WOS corpus remains more strongly organized around machine translation, neural machine translation, AI, translator training and translation technology. The comparison suggests that generative AI has not displaced the translator from the research field. It has moved the centre of attention from the production of a target text to the supervision of a socio-technical process. The article concludes with a four-dimensional responsibility framework centred on quality, cultural mediation, ethical accountability and professional reconfiguration.
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