Four academics and literary translators reflect on the place of artificial intelligence in literary translation, bringing together perspectives from translation practice, literary and translation studies, translator education, and the history of translation. The panel will explore what distinguishes literary translation as a creative, interpretive and historically situated human activity; whether, where and how AI might have a role in the translation of literary texts; and what may be at stake when the translator’s individual voice and responsibility are mediated by technological tools. Particular attention will be paid to classical texts and retranslation, current publishing and educational practices, and the responsibilities of translators, publishers, universities and professional bodies. The discussion will also consider how readers might respond to AI-mediated literary translation and what these developments mean for human creativity and authorship.
Georgios Kentrotis was born in Molaoi, Laconia, Greece. He studied Law and Political Sciences at Athens University, Faculty of Law, Department of Law. He continued his studies at the postgraduate level in administrative law with Professor Wilfried Fiedler of the Universität des Saarlandes (Saarland University) in Germany, where he was awarded his PhD in Law. For a number of years he practiced Law in Athens and abroad.
In 1994 he was elected Member of the Faculty at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University, a position he has held continuously ever since. He has taught as a visiting Professor at other universities in Greece and abroad, in Germany and Italy. He has repeatedly been elected President of DFLTI and appointed member of the Senate of the Ionian University. He is a regular member of many international scientific societies. He has received awards for his poetry in Greece, Italy and Spain. He is associate member of the Academia Hispanoamericana de Buenas Letras de Madrid.
His research interests lie in the fields of the theory and practice of translation, philosophy of language, ancient Greek and Roman literature, world literature, and Greek literature focusing on the Heptanese School, Greek surrealism and literature from the inter-war period up to the present. He translates to Modern Greek from ancient Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Russian and Czech.
He has published more than 60 volumes of translations, three novels and six poetry collections. He is a regular member of Olympiacos Piraeus F.C. His further interests include sports, visual arts, classical music and folk music from around the world, especially the Greek folk music “Rembetiko”, Canzone napoletana (Neapolitan songs) and the Argentine tango.
Rita Kolaiti was born in Patras. She studied Economics in Athens, Film History in London, and Literary History in Paris and Brussels and she holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting, Ionian University. She has worked as a translator for the European Commission (Brussels) as well as for public sector bodies. She has translated numerous books spanning literature, essays, children's and young adult literature, and cinema studies, among others.
For her translation work, she has received several prestigious awards:
Paschalis Nikolaou is Associate Professor in Literary Translation (English-Greek). He studied English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Hertfordshire before completing an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia under an Onassis Foundation scholarship. His monograph, The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue was published through Shearsman Books in 2017. Articles on aspects of translation studies and especially focusing on the relationship between literary translation and creative writing have appeared in several edited volumes. His reviews, translations and poems have been published in, among others, The London Magazine, MPT and The Hopkins Review. In Greece, his work has been published in literary magazines such as Nea Estia, Porfyras, Poiitiki and Nea Eythini, where he is also a consulting editor. Between 2011 and 2023, he was reviews editor of the translation journal mTm.
Paschalis Nikolaou has co-edited Translating Selves: Experience and Identity Between Languages and Literatures (2008), the Selected Poems 1974-2010 of Nasos Vayenas (2010; shortlisted for the Criticos Prize), and he is also the editor and co-translator of 12 Greek Poems After Cavafy (Shearsman Books, 2015). In 2019 he guest-edited issue 12 of Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literature and early 2020 saw the publication of an edited volume, Encounters in Greek and Irish Literature: Creativity, Translations and Critical Perspectives, following a literary festival at the Ionian University which brought together prose writers from the two nations, in the autumn of 2017. In the Spring of 2021, Dr Nikolaou held a Fulbright Fellowship at the Department of Classics of The Ohio State University.
Vassilis Letsios is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Literature and Literary Translation in the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University (Corfu, Greece). He studied Philology at the University of Ioannina and received his MA and PhD in Modern Greek Studies from King's College London. His research focuses on Modern Greek literature, literary translation and retranslation, translation history, Ionian literary culture, and the reception of classical antiquity in modern Greek letters. He is the author of the monographs The Ghost Behind the Arras: Transformations of the “Political Verse” in Twentieth-Century Greek Poetry (2013) and Retranlating the Ancients in the Ionian Poetic Tradition (2025), and has published more than ninety scholarly studies in journals, edited volumes and conference proceedings. He is Director of the Laboratory for Language, History and Culture in the Ionian Space at the Ionian University.
