“Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024) — i.e. a 50% chance that machines will 'perform translation about as good as a human who is fluent in both languages but unskilled at translation, for most types of text, and for most popular languages (including languages that are known to be difficult, like Czech, Chinese and Arabic).'”

By 2024 LLM-based translation had clearly passed the 'fluent but untrained bilingual' bar: a November 2024 benchmarking study found GPT-4 matched junior-to-mid-level professional human translators across high-, medium- and low-resource directions, with commercial systems at or near parity for popular languages.