Poet, translator, publisher and cultural worker Kristian Sendon Cordero has spent his career building literary conversations across Philippine languages and beyond. Photos courtesy of Cordero
Artificial intelligence is changing translation faster than perhaps any technology before it. It can translate articles in seconds, summarize books, imitate writing styles, and produce prose that often sounds convincingly human.
Yet literature has never been measured by speed. A novel lingers because of its rhythm, its emotional undertones, the silence after a sentence, or a metaphor that refuses easy explanation.
Those are the qualities AI still struggles to recognize, said Kristian Sendon Cordero, one of the Philippines' leading literary translators. "A literary translator listens not only to the meanings of words but also to the silences, rhythms, histories, ambiguities, and emotional weight — the gaps and gasps in the texts," he said.
For Cordero, those "gaps and gasps" are not incidental. They are where literature begins.
A poet, fictionist, essayist, publisher, filmmaker, and founder of Savage Mind in Naga City, Cordero has spent decades championing regional literature while translating major works of world literature into Philippine languages. His career spans far more than books. Through publishing, literary festivals, films, and community spaces, he has consistently argued that Philippine literature cannot be understood through Filipino and English alone.
That conviction shapes the way he thinks about translation.
Across our conversation, one idea surfaced repeatedly: languages are never static. They evolve because they encounter other languages, other histories, and other ways of imagining the world. Translation makes those encounters possible.
"Translation remains an act of interpretation, imagination, and hospitality," he said.
Hospitality is an unusual word for translation, but it captures Cordero's philosophy. Every language welcomes a story differently, bringing its own rhythm, humor, memory, and cultural instincts. The translator's responsibility is not simply to preserve meaning but to help the work feel alive in another language without erasing the identity it carried from the first.
That work rarely announces itself. Readers remember the novel, not the translator. They rarely see the uncertainty behind a title, the pages of discarded drafts, or the countless revisions hidden beneath what appears to be an effortless sentence.
At Savage Mind, books, conversations, and community come together under one roof. The independent bookshop reflects Cordero's lifelong commitment to making literature accessible beyond the traditional centres of Philippine publishing.
When one word changes everything
The most revealing translation problems are often the smallest ones.
While translating "The Lake" by Czech novelist Bianca Bellová into Filipino, Cordero found himself returning to a single question: Should the title become 'Lawa' or 'Danaw'? Both words mean "lake"; neither means exactly the same thing.
He eventually chose "Danaw," a word shared across several Philippine languages. Then another coincidence emerged. In Bikol, lawâ — pronounced differently — means "spider," an image that unexpectedly echoed the novel's atmosphere of fragility and environmental decay.
The decision stopped being lexical. It became literary.
Rather than searching for a perfect equivalent, Cordero allowed the languages themselves to enter into conversation. Bellová's fictional landscape met Bikol memory, and the translation became something richer than a direct transfer of meaning.
That is why literary translation resists automation. A dictionary can define a word. Artificial intelligence can suggest dozens of alternatives in milliseconds. Neither can decide which choice carries the emotional gravity of a novel, or recognise when a coincidence inside one language deepens another.
The same instinct guided Cordero's celebrated Bikol translation of Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Instead of asking how Kafka could simply be translated, he began with a more ambitious question: Could the language itself undergo a metamorphosis?
Rather than treating Bikol as a container for a European classic, he explored how Kafka's imagination might uncover possibilities already present within Bikol and Rinconada. Translation became less about reproducing a masterpiece than expanding what a Philippine language could express.
What machines cannot read
Artificial intelligence has become one of the most sophisticated translation tools ever created. It can process contracts, news reports, websites, and conversations with astonishing speed. Used well, it lowers barriers between languages and makes information more accessible.
Literature demands something else. Can a machine recognize longing inside a pause? Can it understand irony without context, or hear the history carried by a single unfamiliar word?
For Cordero, those questions define the difference between translation and literary translation.
He does not reject artificial intelligence. Throughout our conversation, he acknowledged its growing role in publishing and accepted that it will continue changing how translators work. The danger, he suggests, lies in confusing fluency with understanding.
Literary translation begins where certainty ends. Every page asks the translator to weigh competing meanings, preserve ambiguity, and decide whether a sentence should feel familiar or remain deliberately foreign. These are aesthetic choices shaped not only by language but also by memory, culture, and experience.
"Machines may help us produce texts, but only human beings can transform language into a living vessel of solidarity, compassion, and love," he said.
The distinction is subtle but profound. AI predicts language from patterns. Literary translators respond to intention. They recognize when rhythm carries more meaning than literal accuracy, when a cultural reference should remain unexplained, or when silence itself becomes part of the story.
Looking back, Cordero sees little reason to believe literature will disappear simply because technology changes. Books have already survived revolutions in printing, broadcasting, and digital publishing. Each innovation transformed the way stories reached readers, but none replaced the human need to imagine another life beyond one's own.
Translation belongs to that same tradition of renewal. Every new translation allows literature to travel farther without asking it to surrender the cultural experiences that shaped it.
Beyond translating books, Cordero builds communities of readers through Savage Mind and Kamarin, creating spaces where literature, art, and regional languages remain part of everyday cultural life.
More than a bookshop
If translation is Cordero's philosophy, Savage Mind is where that philosophy takes physical form.
The independent bookshop he founded in Naga City has grown into one of the country's most important cultural spaces for regional literature. Books remain at its centre, but they are rarely the destination. Writers launch new works, students attend workshops, artists exhibit alongside authors, and conversations move naturally between literature, film, history, and language.
Together with Kamarin Art Space, Savage Mind reflects a belief that has shaped Cordero's career from the beginning: literature grows through communities.
Publishing regional writers, translating world literature into Bikol, introducing Philippine authors to international audiences, and mentoring younger voices are not separate pursuits. They are different expressions of the same commitment — to keep languages speaking to one another rather than existing in isolation.
That commitment feels increasingly relevant as conversations about artificial intelligence become more urgent.
Technology may continue making translation faster, cheaper, and more accessible. What it cannot automate is the patient work of understanding another culture from within.
"Translation is always a work-in-progress," Cordero said.
The remark sounds modest, but it also explains why literary translation continues to matter.
Languages evolve. Readers change. Meanings shift across generations. Every translation becomes another interpretation rather than a final answer, another opportunity for a story to find new readers without losing the complexities that gave it life.
Perhaps that is the question artificial intelligence cannot yet answer.
It can recognize grammar, imitate style, and process extraordinary amounts of language. But literature has never depended on information alone. It lives in memory, contradiction, humour, silence, and the countless cultural experiences that cannot be reduced to data.
For Cordero, the translator remains the person who carries those invisible things across languages.
Artificial intelligence may continue transforming how the world translates information. But when it comes to literature, the work still begins where algorithms end — with imagination, empathy, and the deeply human ability to hear not only what words say, but everything they leave unsaid.