On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS) with the support of the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission held an online lecture entitled "The Human Translator and AI: Algorithms of Interpretation.”

The lecture was delivered by Prof. Lawrence Venuti (Professor Emeritus of Translation Studies and Foreign Languages, Temple University). The lecture was moderated by Dr. Helena Moniz (Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics and Machine Translation Systems, University of Lisbon and President of the European Association for Machine Translation).

The lecture proposed that AI is a tool for expansion, not replacement. Machines may handle quantity, but meaning remains a human task. The translator’s role is not ending—it is being redefined. The speaker emphasized the need to keep humans at the center of the translation process. Meaning cannot be extracted from statistics, but from understanding. Translation is not a technical task; it is a complex human interpretive act. The lecture received a lot of attention from the audience, with more than 600 people registered for the event.