LES DÉFIS DE LA TRADUCTION POÉTIQUE : UNE ANALYSE COMPARATIVE DES CAPACITÉS ET LIMITES DE L’IA FACE À LA CRÉATIVITÉ HUMAINE
THE CHALLENGES OF POETIC TRANSLATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CAPABILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF AI IN THE FACE OF HUMAN CREATIVITY

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the implications of artificial intelligence for contemporary literary translation, focusing particularly on the translation of poetry as a critical testing ground for technological adequacy. The rapid development of neural machine translation and large language models has profoundly reshaped translational practice and generated renewed debate regarding the evolving role of the human translator. While AI systems demonstrate high levels of lexical accuracy, syntactic fluency, and semantic alignment, their performance varies according to textual typology. Literary translation―and especially poetry―requires the reconstruction of rhythmic architecture, sound patterning, metaphorical density, and symbolic layering, elements that exceed purely denotative equivalence. The study situates AI-driven translation technologies within the broader technological momentum that characterizes the current translational era and explores the reconfiguration of translational agency in this hybrid human–machine environment.To illustrate these theoretical considerations, the article presents a comparative analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Une Charogne”, examining the French original alongside a human Romanian translation and an AI-generated version. The comparison evaluates semantic fidelity, prosodic reconstruction, rhetorical intensity, and aesthetic equivalence. The findings indicate that although AI achieves substantial lexical-semantic correspondence and structural coherence, it fails to reconstruct poetic form, rhythmic balance, and symbolic resonance. By contrast, the human translator preserves aesthetic cohesion and tonal tension through interpretative mediation and stylistic modulation. The article concludes that artificial intelligence may function effectively as a semantic scaffold or drafting instrument, particularly in informational contexts, but poetic translation remains fundamentally dependent on human creative agency. Rather than eliminating the translator, artificial intelligence redefines professional competence as the integration of technological expertise with aesthetic and interpretative judgment.

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