AI Series #2: AI Be Useful in Book Translation?

Using AI for book translation is controversial in ways similar to using AI for audiobook narration: it’s replacing human talent with machines. AI for audiobook narration has been used almost exclusively for books that would not otherwise have audiobook versions, where ordinary audiobook budgets are just not affordable. Will we see the same thing in AI translations?
AI for translation falls afoul of “literariness,” our well-placed affection for the great books that have been translated into English by literary artists. It’s seems like apostacy to imagine that ChatGPT could replace Gregory Rabassa (translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, among many other works).
But this is not primarily about literary translation. Nor is it about translating technical manuals. It’s about using AI to undertake the translation of the many hundreds of thousands of books, both fiction and non-fiction, in many languages, that might never be translated without low-cost AI tools. Is this a good thing? Join us on June 25 and make your own decision.
In this free webinar-and second in BISG's AI Series-Thad McIlroy tackled this question in conversation with Robert Carsten Carlberg, offering a working translator’s perspective, and Len Epp, re: how to translate a book into 31 additional languages in two days.

[@TheIndyAuthorPodcast]

Fascinating conversation--thank you!

[@fenwayfan03]

Around the 47-minute mark, you suggest that people can get an idea of the quality of a translation by running the translated version through AI again to translate it back into its original language. This is a potentially bad piece of advice - you should only do this experiment if you actually understand both languages! The problem is that the errors made by AI when translating into the second language may be made again (or undone, so to speak) when the AI translates the text back into the first language. So you might think, "ok, the back-translated version sounds about right, so the translation must be okay" but in reality the translation may have various grammar and mistranslation issues.