This paper is based on the analysis of translation work carried out by students attending the English language module on translation for tourism at the MA Course in Foreign Languages, Literature and Cultural Tourism at the University of Trieste. Offering students practice in translation from Italian into English has proven to be an excellent means to teach language competence, as it favours a contrastive comparison between L1 and L2 at different levels. In addition, specialized translation allows students to further expand their linguistic knowledge and achieve proficient language skills in a professional field by learning sector-based jargon, style and discourse. Having taught translation of tourist texts for many years at university level, I could not overlook the improved output of Machine Translation software (MT) and the advent of AI, which have changed the way in which translations are processed and delivered. The introduction of these tools has inevitably called for a new approach to teaching translation. This paper aims to show how MTs and AI perform with the translation of tourist texts and compare their output with the work of students to assess whether those tools can outrun human intelligence and irreversibly replace humans in the translation process.
