> Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help

As someone who speaks more than one language fairly well: We can tell. AI translations are awful. Sure, they have gotten good enough for a casual "let's translate this restaurant menu" task, but they are not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality for nontrivial content.

Unfortunately I fear that it might not matter. There are going to be plenty of publishers who are perfectly happy to shovel AI-generated slop when it means saving a few bucks on translation, and the fact that AI translation exists is going to put serious pricing pressure on human translators - which means quality is inevitably going to suffer.

An interesting development I've been seeing is that a lot of creative communities treat AI-generated material like it is radioactive. Any use of AI will lead to authors or even entire publishers getting blacklisted by a significant part of the community - people simply aren't willing to consume it! When you are paying for human creativity, receiving AI-generated material feels like you have been scammed. I wouldn't be surprised to see a shift towards companies explicitly profiling themselves as anti-AI.

As someone whose native language isn't English, I disagree. SOTA models are scary good at translations, at least for some languages. They do make mistakes, but at this point it's the kind of mistake that someone who is non-native but still highly proficient in the language might make - very subtle word order issues or word choices that betray that the translator is still thinking in another language (which for LLMs almost always tends to be English because of its dominance in the training set).

I also disagree that it's "not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality". I have translated large chunks of books into languages I know, and the results are often better than what commercial translators do.