aAs anyone who has pointed their phone’s camera at a foreign menu recently knows, machine translation has come a long way since the early days of Google Translate. While the usefulness of AI-assisted translation in such situations is unquestionable, the proposed use of AI in literary translation is even more controversial.

Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning has announced that it will use AI translation for commercial novels, promising that no books will be translated this way without careful checks and that consent from authors is required. This infuriated both authors and translators, despite their attempts to reassure them.

“Translators don’t just translate words; we build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target audience every step of the way,” says Lukas Reinfeldt in The Discomfort of Evening. says Michelle Hutchison, winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize for translation. “We sneak in subtle hints that help readers understand particular cultural elements and traditions. We convey rhythm, poetry, wordplay, and metaphor. Even in novels, for example, agricultural Accurately study mechanical terminology.

Translators and authors also point out that AI translations require very careful checking and editing, ideally by someone who knows both languages. At that point, the person may end up translating the text themselves. Cultural sensitivity is of particular concern, as AI is known to produce grossly inappropriate material.

“Last year, a reader pointed out some problems with the French version of my book,” says Juno Dawson, author of the “On Her Majesty’s Royal Society” series. “The translators were using slightly outdated words to describe transgender people. They were able to change the terminology before publication. It’s these nuances that the AI misses. I think AI-generated content will require strict editing anyway.”

However, there are some scenarios where machine translation could possibly help creators of cultural works. For example, for writers working in minority languages whose work currently has no translations into English or other languages, AI-assisted translation could help them reach a wider audience. And in video games, localization can be one of the biggest costs for small independent developers, especially those whose first language isn’t English. AI translation of in-game text could theoretically help developers reach a wider audience and help players who speak minority languages enjoy their games more. But there are obvious limitations here as well.

Dr. Jack Ratcliffe is the designer and CEO of Noun Town, a mixed reality language learning game where players roam around a virtual city and converse with locals in one of 40 supported languages. “If you’re playing a simple game where you see text and you press left, right and A to jump, you could probably machine translate it and suddenly it becomes much more accessible to a lot of people in different languages.” he says. “However, if there are nuances like characters having a conversation with each other, and you want to convey that as a game creator… using AI can be scary.”

Noun Town has approximately 50,000 lines of dialogue, all of which is translated by humans, voice-acted, and checked by language teachers. Ratcliffe said the studio experimented with AI translation and found that using it in languages ​​other than English produced significantly worse results.

“What we found in our tests is that into the Nothing is perfect when it comes to AI, but English is actually fine,” he says. “These large language models have learned a lot of English. When you get into other languages, especially less popular ones, the languages ​​become more and more and more confusing.”

Therefore, game developers who create games with lots of words and dialogue are considering the high cost of localization and probably care as much about the meanings and nuances of those words as book authors do. I’m sure there are.

There is a clear difference between practicality and technology when it comes to how people feel about AI translation. Few would argue against using AI like a dictionary to identify meaning. But translators do more than that, of course. Dawson says: “These writers are artists in their own right.”

“I started adding lines to my translations that said, ‘Created by hand, without the use of generative AI,’” Hutchison says. “As translators, given the current threat to our existence, we need to be vocal about what our work is now. It’s not just about typing.