Today, Sebastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha covered 26.2 miles in under two hours. Their achievement lies not in the time itself, but in the fact that they ran that distance through their own physical effort rather than with the help of a vehicle. There would be little particular merit in covering the same distance in the same time by driving or cycling. But they ran that distance by themselves.
I suspect the future of human translation may come to be valued in a similar way. Literary translators will be appreciated not for the final product, but for the intellectual, artistic, and creative effort involved in producing a text oneself, without excessive technological assistance–though determining what counts as “doping” in literary translation may well become the truly interesting debate. In this sense, the ACE Traductores initiative Sello de Traducción Humana seems to move in a very right direction.
I do not see this as an argument against machine translation. We still rely on vehicles to move faster from one place to another. And the potential of AI for scholarship in the humanities is enormous—as I am trying to show in my own research projects. Yet there remain human activities in which effort, craft, and the awareness that something was made by a person continue to matter.