Neural Machine Translation, Large Language Models and Literary Translation: The Story So Far

A seminar with Prof. Dorothy Kenny and Damien Hansen

State-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) is already being used in literary translation, and speculation is rife on how large language models (LLMs) will impact the field. In this workshop we explain the basic techniques that underlie both  technologies, explore how NMT systems have been optimized for or otherwise applied in literary translation, and provide early indications of what LLMs might offer the literary translator. We zoom in on the particular professional, legal, ethical and aesthetic issues that arise for literary translators and their work.