AI Mediated Translation and the Politics of Cultural Representation in Contemporary Indian Literature

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Dr. Rahul Kailas Bharati

Head and Assistant Professor in Law

Dept of Law, Government Institute of Forensic Science,

Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra India, 431004

Orcid id- https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-8165

Abstract— Artificial intelligence is rapidly altering the processes through which multilingual Indian literary works circulate across linguistic, regional, and international boundaries. Although contemporary machine-translation systems increasingly support Indian languages, conventional evaluations remain dominated by lexical correspondence, semantic accuracy, and computational performance rather than the cultural politics embedded in translation. This study identifies a critical research gap concerning the capacity of artificial-intelligence-mediated translation to preserve culturally situated meanings involving caste, kinship, gender, religion, regional identity, oral traditions, metaphors, honorifics, and historically embedded social vocabulary.
The research conceptualizes translation as an algorithmically mediated act of cultural representation rather than a neutral transformation between source and target languages. It proposes a comparative framework for examining human translation, neural machine translation, multilingual foundation models, and human–artificial-intelligence collaborative translation across selected contemporary Indian literary texts.
Keywords— Artificial Intelligence, Literary Translation, Cultural Representation, Indian Literature, Machine Translation, Linguistic Politics

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