Posthumanism epistemology examines forms of knowing, understanding, and defining truth that extend beyond the human. It emerges as a critical response to humanism or as a way to overcome humanism—a philosophical framework that traditionally positioned humans as the central moral agents, capable of producing concepts, and endowed with intellect, authenticity, and agency. Its purpose is to reimagine humans as participants of a larger cognitive ecology — alongside other species, objects, practices, technologies, and now, intelligent machines. Posthumanism also positions itself as a theoretical stance distinct from transhumanism—two terms that are often conflated (Ferrando 2013): while transhumanism works with the human limitations and the options to enhance physical and intellectual capabilities through science and technology, posthumanism rejects the opposition between humans and nonhumans, extending the idea of agency to nonhuman objects, including technologies, previously considered as “mean technologies”. Merzlyakov (2022: S475) argues that “transhumanism can be viewed as a ‘reinforcement’ of humanism, while posthumanism draws attention to the crisis of humanism”. “Reinforcement of humanism” or reaching the stage of the superhuman through “enhancement” (a concept also present in translation studies, in expressions such as translation enhancement, technology-enhanced translator training, data augmentation, augmented translation, or translator implants) or through “anthropotechnics” (Sloterdijk 2009)—“the art or technique of extra-medical transformation of the human being through intervention on their body” (Goffette 2015: 18; our translation)—, can also become a real societal problem, with risks to public health and risks of social transformation. Practices such as strength enhancement (doping, genetic modifications), sharpening of intelligence, procreation control, variation of sexuality, aesthetic modifications and alteration of emotions (Goffette 2015: 21) can de-humanize the human not by connecting him to a larger ecology, but by increasingly transforming the human into an object of technical intervention—something to be optimized and engineered (or manipulated) rather than lived and experienced. This likely accounts for why “many posthuman theorists (Wolfe, Ferrando, Nayar) have attempted to distance themselves from transhumanism and strive to re-focus the conversation from human enhancement to posthumanist thinking, with Wolfe going so far as to call transhumanism ‘bad posthumanism’” (Ehrentraut 2019: 57).

In translation studies, the human-centered perspective has also shaped the image of the translator as a subject endowed with voice and agency, superior to machines. Concepts such as the “translating subject” (Berman 1995: 75), the translator’s voice (Taivalkoski-Shilov 2013)—understood both as a textual trace and as a form of power or agency (what Alvstad terms “voice as agency”, 2013: 209)—and the translator’s agency itself, evident not only in source-text-related processes, but also in broader contextual decisions shaped by cultural, social, or institutional factors (Palumbo 2009: 7; Zha & Yu 2003: 22), have all drawn sustained scholarly attention.

Anthropocentric bias also remains pervasive in translation technology development, and addressing it is seen as vital to the field’s intellectual growth and sustainability (Tieber & Baumgarten 2024: 380). From a posthumanist perspective, this bias reflects a deeper assumption that translation is an exclusively human-centered activity designed to serve human needs. In addition, getting inspiration from early prescriptive Western conceptions of translation, translation technology developers have been treating translation, or the target text (TT), as a replacement of the source text (ST), seeking equivalence or authenticity and fidelity towards the original rather than offering an interpretive view of the ST. This contrasts sharply with non-Western conceptions of translation, where the idea of translation as interpretation and transformation takes precedence over fidelity, therefore extending meaning beyond binaries to ground it in relational ontology (Moleka, 2025; Kokkola, 2025), non-dualism (Nagatomo, 2006), as well as harmony and balance (Hu, 2020). The Western perspective is also reflected in the goals of machine translation (MT) and neural machine translation (NMT) systems (Asscher 2025: 32). Their algorithms are programmed to reproduce a hierarchical relation between the ST and the TT, visually reinforcing notions of linearity, directionality, and substitution—an image of translation as replacement and submission rather than dialogue. This hierarchy is further evident in the asymmetrical treatment of languages in NMT and generative AI, reflecting an imbalance between high-resource languages and low-resource languages. The result is a technologically embedded linguistic inequality, where the dominance of English as a pivot language perpetuates the very hierarchies that posthumanism seeks to dismantle. This unevenness is further reinforced by the opacity of technological systems. As Tieber & Baumgarten (2024: 379) argue, “machines cannot be  mean, of course, but, technological advancement remains shrouded in intransparency and secrecy, not least owing to political power play and capitalist competition.”

Moving away from prescriptive models, later descriptive definitions of translation expanded the boundaries of what counts as “translation” to include “the vast multiplicity and heterogeneity of translation practices across cultures and historical periods” Asscher (2025: 33). “Translation is what translation does”, argued Gideon Toury (Asscher 2025: 34), whatever its features. This flexible and inclusive conceptualization of translation is particularly hospitable to machine translation (MT), as it captures the contemporary diversification of translational practices that now extend far beyond professional domains. Today, “translation” encompasses user-generated and machine-assisted outputs, the condenses or simplified texts produced by MT systems, the TT with various levels of quality, and even the widespread presence of translation in popular culture, research, and documentation. In this expanded landscape—one that, to echo Camus, reminds us that translation ultimately concerns us all—the descriptive model accommodates both human and machine actors, and can thus be read through a posthumanist lens as granting visibility to translational agency as distributed across human and non-human participants, and to forms of translational labor that have historically been undervalued or marginalized. As Asscher notes, “in effect, the descriptive approach to definitions cannot not be inclusive to contemporary MT as a phenomenon of translation” (2025: 35).

Yet, the proliferation of MT has also prompted renewed debates over disciplinary definition, with Asscher arguing that the notion of conscious agency may become central when trying to distinguish human cultural production—which involves creative, aesthetic, and social dimensions—from machinic translation (Asscher 2025: 37). In this context, theoretical discussions on artificial intelligence often privilege a notion of agency grounded in consciousness or sentience, rather than alternative formulations such as functional adaptability or informational control. Accordingly, scholars frequently frame the distinction between human and AI-generated outputs in terms of the presence or absence of conscious agency (Asscher 2025: 38), a debate which exposes the limitations of the anthropocentric worldview and the persistence of a human-centered interpretive frame that interprets nonhuman actions as if they were human (Epley et al. 2007: 867). A non-anthropocentric perspective, by contrast, reframes the question of agency altogether. It acknowledges that nonhuman agents—whether technological, environmental, or biological—possess their own intrinsic value and capacity to affect and be affected. As Gansmo Jakobsen (2017: 184) highlights, such a perspective recognizes that “we have direct responsibilities to natural objects other than human beings.” Posthumanist thought thus moves beyond both human dominance and technological instrumentalism, emphasizing instead the interdependence and entanglement of humans with machines, other species, and ecological systems, and allowing us to reflect upon and provide a response to contemporary global crises—ecological destruction, climate change, and the extinction of species—by offering both critique and orientation for the futures we imagine.

While transhumanism, associated with thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil, foregrounds progress, optimization, and the transcendence of biological limitations—culminating, for some, in the emergence of a post-biological species, “completely unrecognisable to what we are now” (The Ethics Center 2018: online), critical posthumanism emphasizes relationality, ethics, and the dissolution of categorical boundaries between human and non-human entities. Thinkers such as Donna Haraway reframe the relationship between the human and the machine, the organic and the artificial, the self and the other—not as oppositions to be overcome, but as entanglements to be negotiated. In the field of technology development, the question should be no longer whether machines can “replace” human translators, but how human and nonhuman agencies can coexist, collaborate, and even co-create meaning. Some scholars advocate for symbiotic models of translation that see human–machine interaction as a catalyst for new forms of creativity (Petrilli 2014), expanded cognitive and perceptual experience (Mihalache 2021), or increased confidence and efficiency through hybrid collaboration—“combining the strengths of humans and machines […] to significantly increase users’ confidence in machine translation systems” (Ji et al. 2023: 5). Other scholars push this relational thinking further by integrating ecological and non-Western frameworks (Hu 2020) to situate translation as an ecological process—an act of adaptation, negotiation, and survival within broader living systems.

Moving forward, a posthumanist ethics of translation must broaden its moral and theoretical scope to include ecological and nonhuman dimensions. Doing so would allow the discipline to respond more fully to the entangled realities of our time—where human creativity, machine intelligence, and environmental forces co-shape the conditions and meanings of translation itself. Building on current shifts in translation theory and practice—and drawing inspiration from non-anthropocentric approaches already established across the humanities and sciences—we propose a theoretical framework to build and envision future synergies between human translators and machine systems in an interconnected ecosystem.