Translation education in the age of AI: technics, externalized linguistic memory, and attentional governance

This study draws on Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technics to explore how AI reshapes the cognitive and pedagogical conditions of translation education in university settings. Moving beyond a view of AI as a supplementary tool, it argues that AI reconfigures the cognitive ecology of translation learning by altering the relationship among internalized knowledge, externalized linguistic memory, and attention. In AI-mediated translation workflows, textual quality alone no longer provides sufficient evidence of learners’ competence or cognitive engagement. The study therefore identifies attentional governance as a central dimension of translation competence, emphasizing how human scrutiny is directed, adjusted, intensified, and justified across such workflows. It further proposes workflow-based assessment that examines prompting, verification, revision, and justification alongside the final text. By framing translation education as a pharmacological practice, the article shows how pedagogical design can manage the benefits and risks of AI while sustaining interpretive agency.