Germany · Google · France · The Guardian Technology
Even before the advent of LLMs, translation was a precarious profession: a recent survey by the German translators association VdÜ
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Marco Trombetti, the co-founder and CEO of the machine translation company Translated, said: “Without help, the human brain can produce about 3,000 words a day of translation.
Key facts
- In Germany, where the total number of new published books has been gradually declining year on year, literature in translation has held up remarkably well, with 8,765 books in translation published
- In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief
- AI cannot do dialogue,” said Katy Derbyshire, a Berlin-based translator who has rendered into English novels by Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf and others
- In 2024, Springer Nature machine-translated into German an English-language book by a group of Indian academics called ‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx
Summary
In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant ( The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening.) AI had translated the sentence’s meaning but was seemingly unaware that the repetitions rendered the line absurd. When Gentric repeated his experiment this spring, however, the outcome made him feel less at ease: L’air nocturne était vif, pur et vivifiant, DeepL suggested this time.