Professional Translators’ Attitudes towards MT and AI Translation Tools in Romania

Absztrakt

The past few years have seen unprecedented development in machine translation (MT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This has led to fundamental changes in the profession of translation and in the processes carried out by human translators. According to a recent study conducted on a publicly available generative AI system, translation and interpreting are the occupations with the highest AI applicability score (Tomlinson et al. 2025), meaning that these professions are the most likely to be assisted or performed by Artificial Intelligence. Thus, translators and interpreters are faced with an ongoing radical transformation of the industry and their workflow. Our paper discusses how professional translators working in the Romanian translation market are trying to make sense of these changes in terms of job security and the future of the profession. We present and analyse the results of an online questionnaire that aimed to explore the attitudes of translators regarding computer-assisted translation (CAT), MT and AI-generated translation. We point out that although most of our respondents claimed to use new technologies, they expressed concerns regarding the future of the profession and the changing role of human translators.