{"id":25988,"date":"2025-07-21T11:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T11:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/25988\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T11:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T11:33:11","slug":"why-the-books-industry-is-divided-over-ai-literary-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/25988\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the books industry is divided over AI literary translation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Earlier this month, Betsy Reavley and Fred Freeman, founders of the independent publisher Bloodhound Books, launched a new venture<\/a>: Globescribe.ai. This AI-powered fiction translation service is \u201cdemocratising the ability of authors and publishers to get their books out to wider audiences,\u201d says Freeman. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a desire for AI translation to take over the world. We are simply providing an option for authors where an option didn\u2019t previously exist,\u201d Reavley adds.<\/p>\n

Globescribe isn\u2019t the only company taking a leap into the murky territory of AI translation<\/a>. Earlier this year, Audible announced that it would be rolling out AI<\/a> translation services in beta, allowing select publishers to translate their audiobooks for international audiences. Bob Carrigan, CEO of Audible, said at the time: \u201cAudible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks, with the vision of offering customers every book in every language.\u201d Yet these developments have ruffled more than a few feathers in the industry.<\/p>\n

As more companies explore AI literary translation, the rapid progression of the technology, and what that could mean for the future, has divided the books industry. For some, like Reavley and Freeman, the prospect is an opportunity; for others, it is a bleak vision of the future.<\/p>\n

Ian Giles, chair of the Society of Authors\u2019 Translators Association, is worried by the pace of change. \u201cEvery time you blink there\u2019s a new story like Globescribe or this new Audible service, which worries me because Amazon has so much money and computing power at its disposal,\u201d he tells The Bookseller.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of our beef is not so much with tech progress. It is with generative AI that has been \u2018trained\u2019 using our copyright material. I [even] dislike the term \u2018trained\u2019 because it suggests that there\u2019s something sentient on the other side.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In March, the Society of Authors condemned the \u201cappalling\u201d use of pirated books<\/a> for AI training after it was revealed that Meta had used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programmes. Authors expressed their outrage by gathering at a protest outside Meta\u2019s London HQ on the 3rd April<\/a>. Demands for better regulation grew more desperate in the wake of a US court ruling that deemed Meta and Anthropic\u2019s use of books to train AI \u201cfair use\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Giles also expressed his desire for stronger regulation, given the \u201cunsatisfying\u201d AI-copyright protections in the new Data (Use and Access) Bill<\/a>: \u201cWould I like the government to be defending writing professionals? Yes, definitely, but apparently Keir Starmer isn\u2019t getting my mental messages,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Translators\u2019 objections to AI translation are multiple: that it cannot understand context, tone, rhythm or style; that it will lead to an \u201cimpoverishment\u201d of language; that there\u2019s no need to translate every English-language novel in existence; and that it simply doesn\u2019t count as translation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Giles also explained that AI-translated work often would still need to be checked by a translator anyway. \u201cIt\u2019s a grey area,\u201d Giles adds. \u201cIt\u2019s not our job to tell people how to translate and they\u2019ll all have different ways of approaching it. Do you have to sit there with a Biro and lined paper? No. But if you\u2019re going straight to [generative AI], that\u2019s not translation \u2013 that\u2019s checking the computer\u2019s homework, and it shuts down possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frank Wynne, an Irish literary translator from French and Spanish, describes this process as \u201cpost-editing\u201d \u2013 editing a translation produced by AI. It\u2019s something he, and many of his colleagues, have been asked to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody will send me the gibberish that has been spewed out and I have to take this unwieldy blob of text and turn it into a book.\u201d It would be \u201ceasier and faster\u201d, he says, to \u201cstart from scratch\u201d.<\/p>\n

Continues…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, Betsy Reavley and Fred Freeman, founders of the independent publisher Bloodhound Books, launched a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-25988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}