AI translations are getting really usable lately. I'm using it a lot for legal translations between German and English. This went from barely usable ten years ago to basically flawless today. I also use it to localize our company website in German (from English). I've had some native speakers double check my work and while there are occasional mistakes that need fixing, it's basically good enough that I trust it enough at this point to publish and then fix things on an incidental basis rather than getting a manual review first. Just faster and easier. We've had zero comments on this from our German speaking audience. They don't seem to be aware.
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.
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.