cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4448305
The largest book publisher in The Netherlands has confirmed it plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate some of its books into English, The Bookseller can exclusively reveal.
Utrecht-headquartered publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) was acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year. It was Simon & Schuster’s first acquisition of a non-English-language publisher, which it said at the time would help it access “broader European markets”.
A spokesperson for VBK told The Bookseller: “We are working on a limited experiment with some Dutch authors, for their books to be translated into English language using AI. There will be one editing phase, and authors have been asked to give permission for this.
[…]
Ian Giles, chair of the Translators Association at the Society of Authors (SoA), said: “This is concerning news. Earlier this year, the SoA found that one third of literary translators are already losing work to AI. Where work itself is not lost, translators struggle to increase their prices in the face of the AI challenger. This pressure on translators’ incomes jeopardises our ability to support ourselves in what is a highly precarious industry.”
[…]
Surely the quality of translation will not suffer. No way that’s going to happen, nuh uh!
If the quality was actually really good, I’d be less concerned about it, though. If translating well actually just becomes easier, you’d be a fool to not make use of that - would you pay 1000€ for a book that was copied by hand with pen and paper?
LLMs are decent at translating nowadays. As an example, there used to be no proper working translator for toki pona (a context-sensitive constructed language with extremely limited vocabulary and grammar), but now you can easily talk to most models in it.
Claude 3 opus was able to learn a dead language by just having a book about the language in its context window. (Can’t find the source for this rn, but I remember reading about it)
Also, models can translate small programs between programming languages too.
Fiction books require a hire standard for translation, though. It doesn’t just have to be 100% factually accurate to the source book (which I’m not convinced AI is capable of right now), but it has to be aesthetically pleasing on top of that.
LLM are already good at tone for letters etc. As much as it may not be 100%, I’d say it’s close. Using flowery language is not necessarily better. However, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Dutch book translated to English. If this makes art more accessible across language barriers, I’m all for it.