Abstract: The new concept of liberal arts is helpful for us to recognize the characteristics of the humanities.It is different from the traditional humanities in the following aspects: International, interdisciplinary, cutting-edge and theoretical.As a discipline between humanities and social sciences, which is also closely related to natural science and technology, translation studies has all the above characteristics.To redefine translation from the perspective of new liberal arts, it is necessary to step out of the traditional "linguo-centrism" and regard it as an important medium of cross-cultural interpretation, representation, dissemination and construction.In this way, its interdisciplinary characteristics can be highlighted.Confronted with the challenge of machine translation and AI translation, people may think that these two will replace traditional manual translation.It is undeniable that the translation of ordinary texts will be replaced by the above two means, however, the translation of texts with high cultural content and abstract theoretical connotation cannot be replaced by any machine or AI translation, nor can they be replaced by those less talented human translators.