Literary Translation: To AI or Not to AI, That Is The Question
Whether 'tis nobler in modernity to suffer the slings and arrows of an already difficult-to-enter translation industry...
Hear ye, hear ye, it is finally official: even the literary translation industry has begun to use artificial intelligence to cut corners. I may have been overly optimistic, but I quite honestly did not expect to have to write that sentence this side of the decade. The news came as an immense shock, and it came thanks to a whistleblow on X from a British publishing house dedicated to championing female voices, Héloïse Press:
For those unaware of how the literary translation industry works, especially when it comes to newcomers, this may seem to be a slight overreaction. Perhaps the agent just wanted to give the publishing house an idea of what the entire book was like, perhaps they fully intended for a real translator to take on the translation afterwards. That may be, but to fully appreciate the dystopian situation in which we find ourselves, we need to consider…
How To Get Started In Literary Translation (Apparently)
As a fledgling literary translator myself, I’ve put a fair deal of time into researching how one typically gets their start in the industry. From what I’ve gleaned so far, it usually goes like this:
Step 1: Learn a foreign language to a native or almost-native standard, obviously.
Step 2: Be a good writer in your native language, of course.
Step 3: Read intensely in your target language to stay up to date on trends in publishing and to find potential titles to translate.
Step 4: For each book that you think deserves a translation, seek out the foreign rights agent at the appropriate publishing house to find out if the rights are available.
Step 5: If the rights are available, translate an excerpt of the book for free and sometimes write a “readers report”, offer them to the foreign rights agent who will (hopefully) send them to publishers.
Step 6: Take it upon yourself to send your excerpt and reader’s report to publishers.
Step 7: Stumble upon a publishing house who is interested in publishing that specific book.
Step 8: Impress them enough with your excerpt so that they ask you to translate the book instead of offering it to their usual trusted translators.
Step 9: The book makes it to print and you can finally officially say that you are a published literary translator!
Now, that already seems difficult enough, but we should also note that, from step 4 onwards, any number of factors can result in simply having to rinse and repeat the entire process from step 4 once again until you find success, with no income at any point until you reach step 8. Nada. Rien. Nul points for the Republic of Newbie Literary Translators!
N.B.: Other routes into the world of literary translation may be possible, but this is the typical route promoted by those involved in the industry.
Essentially, getting started in literary translation is a rather thankless experience, not unlike that of authors trying to get published. In both cases, an immense amount of free work is required before you have any hope of getting paid work, so it goes without saying that having financial and cultural capital is key if you want this process to go smoothly. Is it fair? Suffice to say that it isn’t, but it is how it is. One could be tempted to say that translators deserve a more secure entry route into the industry than authors, because we are typically more specifically trained in our craft (not that authors aren’t) and we are a smaller population of workers, but the relationship of supply and demand is evidently in the publishers’ favour in both cases, so there isn’t much we can do. So long as there are too many writers and translators to pick from, publishers have no motivation to make things easier for us.
So, what about this AI nonsense then?
OK, let’s get back on track. As we have established, one of the only ways to get your start as a literary translator is to translate and propose book excerpts for free. So, what happens if foreign publishing houses begin using AI to translate excerpts for them? Well, we newbies could continue to translate and propose excerpts ourselves, but we would be in competition with highly-efficient machines. This means that foreign publishing houses could easily propose excerpts from every book in their catalogue and entirely cut out new translators from even the opportunity to translate excerpts.
We should note, too, that AI is also capable of synthetising information, so we will also be cut out from the work of creating reader’s reports.
Where does this leave us? We could try to propose entirely translated books, like authors propose entire manuscripts, but those paying attention will already see the catch: AI can do that too, as we saw with the one agent who tried to shop an entirely AI-translated manuscript to Héloïse Press.
In any case, in a world where AI translation replaces entry-level translators in the early stages of foreign rights proposals, access to the industry will become even more limited than it already is. In fact, if you can think of any way that a new translator could break into the industry in this scenario, you are already doing better than this writer.
Now, let’s talk solutions
Where do we go from here? I have had to wrack my brains a little, but I have a couple ideas. One relies on publishers acting justly towards writers and translators, like we saw with the aforementioned Héloïse Press, and the other relies on the government caring about us.
Solution No. 1 - The Legal Route
One way to curb the encroachment of artificial intelligence on our artform would be to lobby the government to make it illegal to publish or otherwise disseminate a translated text without the translator’s name attached. In the case of published books, this would specifically require that the translator’s name be on the cover. This law would most importantly stipulate that this is required whether the translator is a human or a machine.
In practice, this solution would leave publishers with the choice of either employing humans or admitting on the front cover of their books that ChatGPT or DeepL did the work for them.
If this law were to be considered, the publishing industry will undoubtedly lobby the government for restrictions to it as well, so we could run the risk of ending up with a law whereby so long as an AI translation is edited by a human, that human’s name would supercede the AI and negate the need to put the AI’s name on the cover. This would be far from perfect, but it would still be a protection, which is more than what we currently have in this wild west of artificial intelligence.
Solution No. 2 - The Trusting Route
Alternatively, we could simply trust publishers to continue to employ human translators instead of using AI… Yes, I know, we would all feel ever so optimistic about our future careers as translators if this were the only possible solution.
Overall…
Who knows how this is all going to work out. For myself, I can only hope that I can somehow make my dreams of literary translation a reality. For more on that, feel free to check out my article about a French YA novel that I would especially love to translate. If any publishers or editors are reading this, I would like to specify that there are no hard feelings. I know that you all have other forces pressing upon you, constantly requiring more profit at lower cost, but I also know that each and every one of you do what you do for the love of the craft, just like us translators, and it is with that same mindset that I look forward to working with you one day.
Addendum: The Rant Thread
This article was inspired by my thread on X (Twitter) citing the whistleblowing tweet from Héloïse Press, which went minorly viral in the translator circles (that’s a new one for me!) Since my emotional state led to it become more of a rant than a mindful argument, I decided to put together this article to better express my thoughts on the topic, but here’s the text of the thread for those who are interested (you can also click the image below to see the thread on X).
As someone trying to break into literary translation, this sort of behaviour almost makes me want to give up for good. If agents are sending in entire manuscripts translated by AI, what hope is there for us newbies?
One of our only ways into the industry is through translating and proposing excerpts, but if some industry professionals are somehow comfortable with cutting out translators full stop, it’s almost certain that more are already cutting us out of this entry-level stage.
What does this mean for the diversity and renewal of the literary translator community? Pre-AI, opportunity was already dependant on financial privilege, with any hope of breaking into the industry requiring time and effort pretty much incompatible with full-time work.
That’s without taking into account the cultural and financial capital needed to keep up to date with source-language literature trends in order to even know what to translate.
That was then, and it was already bad enough, but now even the free work of the privileged few is being made redundant by ultra-efficient yet soulless AI.
Unfortunately, since I cannot even imagine a solution to this right now (at least not one that doesn’t rely on publishing industry professionals being particularly kindhearted), I have to end this thread without offering any hope.
