The MLA Forum on Translation Studies showcases emerging theoretical perspectives on AI and auto-generated translation in literary texts, subtitles/closed captioning, pseudo-translation, or mechanical interlingual applications, especially as they reflect shifts in human agency or lack of extraverbal cues. The first of three 20-minute max. presentations will critically examine the recent shift in machine translation technology from statistical and algorithmic approaches during the Cold War boom to the present-day use of neural (or deep) machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence which uses the dynamic accumulations of big data as a latter-day Rosetta stone for translation. Working at the boundaries of translation studies by unifying recent work on digital environments and game culture with literary theory and the philosophy of language, “Big Translation” presents a genealogical critique of an uncertainty principle lingering in translation. The second presentation builds on the first by focusing on the Turing Test, the philosophico-scientific experiment famously devised by Alan Turing as the threshold beyond which it becomes impossible to tell human and machine intelligence apart, positing language as the central and distinctive facility of human intelligence. Contemporary speculative fiction has reflected on the status of language as the threshold of humanity. On the other hand, there has been much debate within the AI community on the pragmatic benefits (and occasionally, the philosophical implications) of the choice of language models for machine translation and natural language processing. By reading two recent novels, Louisa Hall’s Speak and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun in the context of contemporary debates on both the algorithmic and philosophical implications of language models, Prof. Basu will argue that what is at stake in reimagining machine mediated language is not merely a technical problem, but a fundamental reevaluation of what it means to be human, particularly in an age where AI increasingly troubles and undermines certain fundamental post-enlightenment categories – subject and object, self and other, individual and collective – that are heavily invested in the notion of language as a distinctively human activity. The third presentation grounds these considerations in Foucault's L'archeologie du savoir, tracing the move from human-created language to the incorporation of documentary material to its AI accusation of sets of "unities, totalities, series, relations" reconstituted from previous information to interrogate the creation of knowledge as a product of language. Prof. McMurran, whose translation studies expertise focuses on the intersection of form/genre and the translation of cultural meaning, will lead the Forum's discussion and question-and-answer period of at least 15 minutes.