Exploring the social functions of creativity in the age of generative AI

Abstract

This article asks whether creativity will still be a key skill for translators in the future, as we move towards ubiquitous and more diversified uses of generative AI. The focus is primarily on creativity in translation. Instead, creativity is here conceptualised as a soft skill, crucially linked with a number of social functions. We hypothesise that if the development of creative skills is linked to technical skills and accompanied by critical reflection on the latter, it could be one of the cornerstones of training programmes aimed at future proofing translators faced with rapidly changing professional environments.
The research presented here was conducted as part of an introductory course on machine translation at the University of Grenoble Alpes (UGA). Based on a creative task given to first-year students in the Master’s programme in Multilingual Specialised Translation (TSM), we analyse their relationship with technological tools. We show that the task allows us to address the emotional components of the relationship with technological tools while building critical, often optimistic, projections about the links between translators and what is most commonly referred to as technological progress.