Artificial intelligence (AI) is endlessly feeding the eardrums of listeners with what we can call the fast food of content: a soulless and crass mix of perfect sound, horribly imitating the human voice. <...> But narration is an art.

<...> It [AI] takes literature — one of the most valuable human art forms — and strips it of its humanity. Like fast food, it is wholly unhealthy — a destroyer of taste and authenticity.

We must ask ourselves, “Do we really listen to audiobooks purely to consume words?” I hope we don’t. I believe we listen to audiobooks for an expressive interpretation of the written text, for the personal touch of a human.

Dearest creature in Creation,
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye your dress you'll tear.
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it?
Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,

Sword and sward, retain and Britain,
(Mind the latter, how it's written!)
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say—said, pay—paid, laid, but plaid.

One key area of focus [for us] is reimagining project management within the TMS through conversational interfaces. Imagine simply telling the system: “Create a project with these six files, in these languages, by this deadline,” and having it respond with a recommended workflow, resource allocation, and execution plan. That’s the direction we see the [translation and localization] industry moving.

So, inspired by the philosophies of the slow food and slow tourism movements, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting proposes an alternative approach – the idea of ‘slow translation’.

We argue that 'slow translation' is a human process thoughtfully carried out by people who care about words and meaning, and who value the time needed to research and understand the intricacies of the source text before translating it into the target language with precision, skill and artistry.