A Dutch publisher has announced that it will use AI to translate some of its books – but those in the industry are worried about the consequences if this becomes the norm.
and so it begins…
A Dutch publisher has announced that it will use AI to translate some of its books – but those in the industry are worried about the consequences if this becomes the norm.
and so it begins…
I’ve used deepl, and as a “quick solution/I’m fine with the occasional error” translation service it’s definitely better than Google. As a commercial platform probably tracking more than I personally care for, trying to corner a market share —not so much.
But neither of the above are fit for translating books of any kind (except perhaps as a joke to emphasise just that). And I’m still doubtful of the “AI” models doing any better.
DeepL has always used machine learning, and they already switched to LLMs for some language pairs – not rebranded ChatGPT, but their own stuff. They’re also quite open about the model not being perfect, they’re advertising with things like “blind tests show our results sound more natural than the competition”, “our model output needs fewer edits than the competition”, etc.
And yeah they definitely didn’t edit this one much from the English original. English sentence structure and American idiomatics all over the place, it’s tedious to read. Quite, but not entirely, as bad as this.