All crafts and professions have been impacted by artificial intelligences explosive growth in the twenty-first century. The translation industry is no exception, by contrast, its even more affected than others. Artificial intelligence has brought a variety of opportunities to the development of the translation industry but also faced unprecedented challenges. Students who are majoring in translation have to face the structural changes brought by machine translation to the language service industry. Under this change, educators must realize the importance of cultivating excellent college students translation technology abilities. Therefore, this paper studies the opportunities and challenges of the cultivation of college students translation technology ability in the context of artificial intelligence, as well as how to make appropriate responses to these opportunities and challenges. According to research, it found in the face of the impact of artificial intelligence, the challenges of cultivating college students translation ability are mainly in the aspects of ethics and resource competition. However, the complexity and flexibility required by cross-cultural communication cant be replaced by machines at present, which is exactly the opportunity to cultivate the translation ability of college students. Translation is an important way of international communication. In the era of artificial intelligence, exploring how to make good use of the advantages of man-machine combination can not only improve their own ability but also build a more convenient and stable bridge for communication between countries.