I recently added French for some of our pages as we were getting some inbound from France. You still need to be careful but mostly it does the job. And I get a kick out of seeing my writing translated into what looks (to me) pretty elegant French. I have some dormant memories of high school French. Enough to appreciate it. I generally just use OpenAI's o4 model currently. I might experiment with 4.5 to see if it does a better/different job. I generally just paste markdown and let it translate the whole thing with the instruction to preserve the structure. Works well enough.
I'm guessing there are going to be a lot of AI assisted book translations in the near future. I appreciate that they might not be amazing but they are probably getting good enough. And increased context sizes and improved instruction following should also make it easier for translators to stay on top of and direct/oversee the quality; e.g. fine-tuning certain wording and stylistic touches.
Probably a bigger factor here is original authors gate-keeping quality here. They wouldn't necessarily want a low quality translation misrepresenting their work. However, I would expect that especially authors targeting relatively minor languages might have an incentive to self-publish their work in other languages targeting larger audiences (English, Spanish, etc.) and that a few successes with this might make them more confident. If you did the hard work writing the book and it's moderately successful, why not increase the potential audience by 10-20x? Of course publishers might pick up on this faster than starving authors.
And the standards for self publishing on e.g. Amazon are pretty low. Probably a lot of AI generated garbage there to begin with.
> Perhaps there is a larger prejudice here against scrutiny of translation as overly academic, an exercise in smug pedantry hampering creative freedom
Yes. And while the discussion is about literary work, I think this is an extension of the stance people have toward translation in general.
We see that with product designers demoing AI translation as "transparent", and something that allows users to not have to care about the language barriers anymore.
While being able to roughly understand foreign contents is better than nothing, too many people IMHO are assuming that auto-translation is good enough. It seldom is, and will probably never be if we care even a little about what people are really trying to say. You can survive with translation, but the bare minimum shouldn't be the end goal, or at it we should keep in mind the missing parts.
[0] https://acculing.com/difference-between-translation-and-adap...
jbjbjbjb•9mo ago
kevingadd•9mo ago
readthenotes1•9mo ago
Lol Just learn many other languages and cultural idioms that are sometimes regional and dense with meaning?
alganet•9mo ago
kevingadd•9mo ago
readthenotes1•9mo ago
Also, as I mentioned, some idioms have regional meaning which raises the complexity greatly
PaulDavisThe1st•9mo ago
nemetroid•9mo ago
j7ake•9mo ago
Second, Learning a language is not a binary variable. It takes decades to master a language.
Finally, Your ability to appreciate a book is both a function of the text and your ability to comprehend the text. A translated book will give you better experience than the book in a language you are unfamiliar with.
kevingadd•9mo ago
AlotOfReading•9mo ago
jbjbjbjb•9mo ago
I think it’s a trade off then. I’d prefer authenticity, richness and nuance over accessibility. It is just preference. Did you prefer the modern accessible versions of Shakespeare or the originals in their Elizabethan glory?
PaulDavisThe1st•9mo ago
NoTeslaThrow•9mo ago
giraffe_lady•9mo ago
These have as much to do with ancient greek culture and maybe mindset as language per se. But even still, the choice is to elide them or let them be strange. There's no real way to carry the meaning through to english without it being striking, calling attention to the original.
NoTeslaThrow•9mo ago
Granted, the languages I speak have so little overlap in text it's actually quite difficult to imagine translating between them without a great loss of meaning and tone. And if you look at something like Tang chinese poetry (let alone something truly ancient) translation becomes a game of "which aspect of the linguistic dynamics here are worth communicating to english speakers?"
So, I'm not sure the "language" punches through so much as you see innovation in the use of english to convey virtually-impossible-to-translate tone and rhythm and wordplay—but it's still relatively contemporary and idiomatic english, or it would simply not reach most readers. Though somehow superlative translators manage more than I thought was possible.... sometimes it feels like reading shakespeare at great effort and difficulty is the closest english-only-speakers will come to understanding how constraining a language modern english is for formal poetry.
Prose is much easier.
jbjbjbjb•9mo ago
However, there will be cases where the original text will have lines that shaped the language and literature it came from and it would be remiss not to let the reader feel that texture, even if it is a challenge to read.
It's difficult to pick examples but an influential line like 'all that glisters is not gold' could be translated to the equivalent of 'don't be fooled by appearances' but that would just kill the imagery and poetic quality. I would want the equivalent of 'glister', I'd want it to express the shine and glow, I'd want the word to be archaic and I'd want the rhythm of the line to be there.
makeitdouble•9mo ago
An adaptator getting rid of them to have more natural English will come up with way worse phrasing, while losing a lot of the nuance and meaning of the original text.
In a way, the reader undertands that it all happens in a non-English country, so getting unnatural English phrasing isn't much of an issue.
bigstrat2003•9mo ago
retrac•9mo ago
For example, many people in this thread are insistent they want a "phrase by phrase" translation. But what if the author wrote the book in a colloquial spoken style, that is specifically supposed to come across as neutral contemporary language? If you translate the work into English in a stilted style that carefully preserves the structure of the original even when it produces unnaturalistic English, you have lost a key aspect of the original vision of the work. It won't hit the reader the same way.
lubujackson•9mo ago
Sometimes translators can highlight a less considered aspect of the work, like when you hear a great cover song that makes you appreciate the original that much more.
I understand the ideal of the perfectly translated thing, by definitionally it can't exist. I suggest going to a library and read the first page of 5+ translations (let's say, Don Quixote) and you will have a pretty clear sense of what the original text must have conveyed as well as several conflicting voices, some of which you will hate and others you may even appreciate. But you can never hear the original through a translation so it might as well be one that is interesting in its own right.
watwut•9mo ago