On Translation and the Limits of Imitation: A Schleiermachian Critique of AI

This article critically examines the progress of generative artificial intelligence (AI) based on large language models via the premise that recent advances have simultaneously been significant and lacking when applied to textual production and, in particular, translation. It examines the often contradictory notions of intelligence (as intellect or cognition) in debates between AI developers, the individual and collective relationship between language, body and thought, and the literary foreshadowing that points to an age in which machines abolish the need for writers and translators through the ability to pre-empt any possible text in any language. The article concludes by offering a delineation of the use of language centred mainly on communication versus the establishing of newness based on the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher in order to demonstrate the significant difference between the two, and how that reflects advances in AI in the former as well as its shortcomings in the latter.