Generative AI can now produce fluent translations in seconds. What does this fact tell us about translation, and what might translation tell us about AI? Drawing on literary translation, interpreting, teaching, and recent experiments with AI-assisted humanities research, Russell Scott Valentino considers translation as a cultivated practice of judgment: one learned through experience, embodied participation, and engagement with other practitioners and audiences. Through anecdotes, examples, and key historical episodes, he explores what happens when prediction meets judgment, speed meets productive delay, and new technologies make long-standing human practices newly visible. A “reverse town hall” conversation will follow, inviting participants to bring examples and questions from their own practice and their encounters with AI, translation, and other forms of creative and intellectual work.

Russell Scott Valentino is the Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters at Indiana University, where he also serves as Professor and Chair in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and Director of the Translation Research Commons. His work has been published by the NY Times, Reaktion Books, The Harvard Review, Yale University Press, and a dozen other literary magazines and book publishers; and supported by the NEH, the NEA, PEN American, and the U.S. Departments of State and Education. Former Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review and former President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), Valentino served on the 2022 jury for the National Book Awards. He is the founder and publisher of Autumn Hill Books and blogs at russellv.com. His translation of Miljenko Jergovic’s family saga Kin (Archipelago Books, 2021) received AATSEEL’s 2023 Best Prose Translation award. His translation (with Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester) of Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale was published by Indiana University Press in December, 2025.