this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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54
Are AI Models Advanced Enough To Translate Literature? The Debate Is Roiling Publishing: Major publishers are experimenting with automated translations, hundreds of which have already been produced. (themarkup.org)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Last November, The Bookseller reported Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning, owned by publishing titan Simon & Schuster, was testing the use of artificial intelligence to help translate several of its books to English.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I studied translation in college, and sometimes I'll do translation work as a freelancer. In my opinion it's really hard for a machine to get the intricacies of translation. it's not just "convert" from one language to another, there are linguistic devices people use to make writing more "interesting".

I'll give two examples

I read this book called Blue Belle in both English (original language) and Portuguese (translation). there's this bit on the original where the protagonist Belle says

If I were a flower I'd be a bluebell

in Portuguese they just translated the name of the flower into "campanula". the word trick was completely lost.

another case is that joke "why is 6 afraid of 7? because 7 8 9". it's untranslatable into Portuguese, for instance. there's no way to translate the sound of "seven eight/ate nine"...

a human translator will try to find a way to at least explain it to the reader, sometimes via a footnote, but a machine won't be able to do it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

To be fair a lot of human translators don't bother to be accurate or capture wordplay. Some of the translations for netflix are so bad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

you're right, there are translators and translators

that's why there are expressions such as "traduttore, traditore" ("translator, traitor" in Italian). to translate is to betray the language in a way

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Great expression.