Kaibao Hu
Development of Translation Studies in the Context of Large Language Models:
Issues and Prospects
The use of large language models has brought tremendous opportunities and challenges to translation practice and research. Following an introductory account of the development as well as the main features of large language models, this article analyzes the impacts their use has made on translation research and goes on to speculate on the future of translation studies as a result of this new development. It concludes that the use of large language models in translation practice has brought many changes to the subjects of translation and the attributes of translated texts, forcing translation scholars to rethink a wide range of issues concerning translation ethics, translator subjectivity, translator styles and ideology in translation, and it has also brought about changes in methodology of translation research, ushering in a growing trend toward data-driven and visualization-based approaches.
