Abstract

A translation of a text of any kind is a derivative intellectual work. It involves a transformation of the original text, and therefore it is a right of the holder of that text to authorize (or not) its translation. This is covered in Article 8 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of September 9, 1886, and the same Convention tells us in Article 2.3 that “Translations, (…) and other alterations of a literary or artistic work shall be protected as original works without prejudice to the copyright in the original work (…)”. The rights ownership of the translator implies that the translation cannot be used without authorization from the translation copyright owner. These premises are jeopardized with the use of AI systems and the introduction of machine translation. The key issues raised by the new technologies are the ownership of rights over machine translations, and the possibility of using the results associated with translation as data for the improvement of Machine Translation algorithms.