AI-translated Books

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Clarissa

July 25, 2025

For the first time, I have in my hands a book that was translated by AI. There’s nothing in the publishing information about a translator of any sort, but I teach translation, and in class we explore the uses of AI for translating texts.

As expected, the quality of the translation is abysmally poor. It’s not that it contains mistakes but that not a single sentence is translated correctly. It’s a mockery of both languages.

This is not a work of fiction but they time will soon come when efforts to save on hiring a translator will lead to the brutalization even of literary books.

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5 responses to “AI-translated Books”

cliff arroyo

July 26, 2025

“book that was translated by AI”

….why? There are already a bunch of decent machine translation tools out there….

I’ve been told that pretty much all professional translators make extensive use of machine translation and their work goes less from formulating texts to editing texts for style and other considerations.

“will lead to the brutalization even of literary books”

I’m sure. One of the dirty secrets of translation is that often the person or entity’s paying for it don’t especially care about the quality… weird but true.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 26, 2025
  
  I have nothing against translators using either AI or any other machine translation tools. I do that myself. All translatoes use them. But this is a completely different situation. This is a book where no human translator participated at all. The text was uploaded to an MT tool and then the result was published.
  
  And it’s horrible. There are tons of very basic mistakes, like “Jacques smiled and took her wife’s hand.” This is typical MT that doesn’t understand French and Spanish possessives and assigns the translation randomly.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    July 26, 2025
    
    Another very typical AI mistake: “Some of her classmates, who seemed prepared to photocopies of the documents, questioned the interest of doing so.” This is not a debatable issue of style but serious mistakes on the level of syntax and basic vocabulary.
    
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  2. Clarissa
    
    July 26, 2025
    
    Another set of mistakes that no human would make: “To accompany his youngest daughter to the altar, he bought a tuxedo as white as the hair it still has.” Leaving aside that in English a father doesn’t accompany but walk his daughter to the altar, the pronoun confusion is, again, very typical.
    
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  3. cliff arroyo
    
    July 26, 2025
    
    “this is a completely different situation”
    
    I agree about machine translation but AI is another critter. Machine translation tools ime don’t just make up stuff when the input is very ambiguous or nonsensical. The output might be nonsensical or it just leaves it out which a translator can spot and correct. AI, however, is notorious for doing just that making stuff up to make the consumer happy.
    
    And given the job destroying purpose of AI there are going to be more of these monstrosities.
    
    If I were a bit more paranoid… I’d think the destruction of the humanities in higher education is at least partly about removing people who can tell the difference between a human translator (even if aided by digital tools) and AI slop.
    
    I’ve been amazed at how… tone deaf many normal people (not stupid just not familiar with language based issues) can’t tell the difference between garbage and well-crafted texts….
    
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