Creativity and narrative engagement of literary texts translated by translators and neural machine translation

2026-07-22

Artificial Intelligence and Neural Machine Translation (MT) are at the forefront of the technology advances and are becoming ubiquitous in society. As automation increases, creativity is continuously referred as the characteristic that will differentiate us from machines. However, there is a need to understand what is meant by creativity in different contexts, and how technology impacts society in this regard. Focusing on the textual elements that determine creativity in translated literary texts and the reader experience, CREAMT uses a novel, interdisciplinary approach to assess how effective MT is in literary translation considering the ultimate user: the reader. Research has shed some light on the usability of MT in literary texts showing that it might help translators, when it comes to productivity. However, translators’ perception is that the “more creative” the literary text, the less useful MT is. But can we quantify the creativity in texts translated by humans as opposed to those produced with the aid of machines? And what is the reader’s experience when faced with machine-translated texts? Do users exposed to different translation modalities have different reading experiences? With this fellowship, I will analyse the creative aspect of literary texts translated using three modalities: MT, human translation and MT post-editing. CREAMT will quantify the reader’s experience using methodologies from Psychology, Communication and Literary Studies. This fellowship will take place in the Computational Linguistics group in the Faculty of Arts at University of Groningen under the supervision of Dr. Antonio Toral who is leading the research on MT applied to literary texts. I have also planned a one-month secondment at the Film, Media and Visual Studies at University of Augsburg with the supervision of Prof. Helena Bilandzic who is an expert in the field of narrative experience and persuasion focusing mostly on entertainment narratives.

Netherlands

2026-02-15