TOAs anyone who’s tried to point their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the early days of Google Translate. The usefulness of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable, but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial.
Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged authors and translators alike, despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no book will be translated this way without verification. careful and that the authors will have to give their consent. .
“A translator translates more than just words: we build bridges between cultures, keeping the intended readers in mind every step of the way,” says Michele Hutchison, winner of the 2020 Booker International Prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. “We smuggle in subtle clues to help the reader understand particular cultural elements or traditions. We transmit rhythm, poetry, word games, metaphor. We researched the precise terminology for, say, farm machinery, even in a novel.”
Translators and authors have also noted that AI translation requires very careful review and editing, ideally by someone who knows both languages. At that time, that person could also be translating the text. Cultural sensitivity is a particular concern, as AI is known to produce wildly inappropriate things.
“Last year, a reader pointed out some problems in a French edition of one of my books,” says Juno Dawson, author of the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. “The translator had used a slightly outdated term to describe a trans person. We were able to change the term before publication. It is these nuances that I suspect the AI would miss, meaning that AI-generated content would require rigorous editing anyway.”
However, there are some scenarios in which machine translation could help creators of cultural works. For writers working in minority languages, for example, whose works are not currently translated into English or other languages, an AI-assisted translation could attract the attention of many more readers. And in video games, localization can be one of the biggest costs for smaller independent developers, especially those for whom English is not their first language. In theory, AI translation of in-game text could help those developers reach a much broader audience and help players who speak minority languages enjoy their games more. But there are obvious limitations here too.
Dr. Jack Ratcliffe is the designer and CEO of Noun Town, a mixed reality language learning game in which players walk around a virtual town and talk to locals in one of 40 supported languages. “If you’re playing a simplistic game where the text is, press left and right and A to jump, you can probably automatically translate it and suddenly it will be much more accessible to many people in different languages,” he says. “But if you have some kind of nuance, characters that talk to each other, and you want to convey that as a game creator… I’d be terrified to go with AI.”
Noun Town has around 50,000 lines of dialogue, all translated and interpreted by humans and reviewed by language teachers. The study experimented with AI translation, Ratcliffe says, and found that when they used it with languages other than English, the results were significantly worse.
“What we have found in our tests that goes in In reality, English is fine, although with AI nothing is perfect,” he says. “These great linguistic models have learned a lot of English. When you move to other languages, especially the less popular ones, things become more and more widespread, more and more confusing.”
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Any game developer who creates a game with a lot of words and dialogue, then, faces a high localization cost and presumably cares about the meaning and nuances of those words as much as the author of a book.
When it comes to how people feel about AI translation, there is a clear distinction between utility and craftsmanship. Few oppose using AI in the same way as a dictionary, to discern meaning. But translators, of course, do much more than that. As Dawson says: “These writers are artists in their own right.”
“I started adding a ‘handmade without the use of generative AI’ line to my translations,” Hutchison says. “As translators we must be very clear about what our work entails at this time, given the threat to our existence. “It is much more than just writing with a dictionary.”