A Book Review of Audiovisual Translation in the GenAI Age
Abstract
machine translation, voice generation, and subtitle production into increasingly automated workflows. Patrizia Giampieri and Vanessa Leonardi's Audiovisual Translation in the GenAI Age: Applications in Translator Training and Specialized Domains (Routledge, 2026)[9] examines
these developments through empirical cases in translator training, dubbing, subtitling, and specialized translation. This review argues that
the book is strongest as a systematic diagnosis of AI failure rather than as a demonstration of the efficiency of human-machine collaboration.
Its cases reveal cascading errors from speech recognition to translation, pragmatic and cultural distortion, algorithmic sanitization of marked
speech, and persistent weaknesses in legal and medical domains. The book also shows that translator roles are shifting toward evaluation,
post-editing, and quality control. Nevertheless, the proposed hybrid model requires stronger comparative evidence on time, quality, editing
effort, and professional responsibility. The book is therefore most valuable as a research agenda: it identifies where GenAI fails in AVT and
clarifies why human judgment remains necessary in multimodal, specialized, and culturally sensitive communication.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v4i8.10184
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