Translators must defend their role not by competing with artificial intelligence (AI) on speed, but by taking responsibility for the cultural and ethical choices embedded in their work, experts said Friday at a conference on literary translation organized by the Literature Translation Institute (LTI) Korea. The International Translators' Summit brought together Lee Sang-bin, a professor of English interpretation and translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Korean American literary translator and poet Stine An; and novelist-translator Moon Ji-hyuk. The discussion wasn't about whether AI can produce fluent translation. Instead, the panelists focused on who should bear responsibility for a translation, how translators should use AI and what kind of work must remain human-led. Lee argued that translation is not simply the transfer of meaning from one language to another. “I want to say that translation is not the work of copying meaning, but an act of responding to the words of the other,” the professor said, adding that a translator can never completely know an author or sou