AI & TRANSLATION
From Google Translate to DeepSeek, from Claude to Gemini, artificial intelligence is reshaping the politics and poetics of translation.
However, rather than replacing professional or community translators with machines, our research programme investigates the challenges and affordances of Human-AI Co-Creation.
Post-editing is only one such form of collaborative intelligence; prompt engineering and task assignment across multiple tools augment and refine the process. And always, we are focused on both what is gained and what is lost.
Much more than simple linguistic fidelity, we explore cultural nuance, aesthetic dimensions, and ethical practice, whether in the context of literary, technical, legal, or multimodal translation.
Student Research Profiles
Echo Gao (China)
My research examines the ethical tensions emerging between existing translation practice and the growing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in professional workflows. By analysing the Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct from the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters (NZSTI), I investigate how current professional standards respond to AI-assisted translation and where further guidance may be needed. My work explores the shift from AI towards Intelligence Augmentation (IA), with a focus on strengthening ethical frameworks that support human agency and align professional codes with evolving industry practice.
Xuewei Mu (China)
My research project investigates Human–AI collaborative poetry translation through a role- based workflow. It translates previously unpublished poems by Seamus Heaney, develops a method for Human–AI co-creative translation, and highlights the irreplaceable role of human creativity.
Shuai Song (China)
My research project investigates a comparative study of AI and human translation in literary texts through examining The Analects of Confucius in Chinese-to-English translation, which aims to discuss their main differences and similarities regarding linguistic features, cultural connotations and literary aesthetics by multi-level comparative analysis, corpus-based and case study methods.
Lise Dannies Hope-Suveinakama (Atafu, Tokelau)
My research project examines the pivotal role of translation and interpreting in Tokelauan people’s access to justice, a right that small Indigenous communities struggle to access. It will develop a Tokelauan-English legal glossary using ethical methods to assist my key stakeholders, members of Tokelauan communities, translators, interpreters, lawyers, and academics.
Luoqi Yang (China)
My research project investigates translation of 20th century Chinese female poetry from a sociosemiotic perspective, using qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine four representative poets, establish equivalence criteria, and propose targeted translation strategies.