this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
19 points (88.0% liked)

Europe

1559 readers
164 users here now

News and information from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)

Rules (2024-08-30)

  1. This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
  2. No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
  3. Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
  4. No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
  5. Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
  6. If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
  7. Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in [email protected]. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
  8. Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
  9. No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)

(This list may get expanded when necessary.)

We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.

If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.

If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @[email protected], @[email protected], or @[email protected].

founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4448305

Archived link

The largest book publisher in The Netherlands has confirmed it plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate some of its books into English, The Bookseller can exclusively reveal.

Utrecht-headquartered publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) was acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year. It was Simon & Schuster’s first acquisition of a non-English-language publisher, which it said at the time would help it access “broader European markets”.

A spokesperson for VBK told The Bookseller: “We are working on a limited experiment with some Dutch authors, for their books to be translated into English language using AI. There will be one editing phase, and authors have been asked to give permission for this.

[...]

Ian Giles, chair of the Translators Association at the Society of Authors (SoA), said: “This is concerning news. Earlier this year, the SoA found that one third of literary translators are already losing work to AI. Where work itself is not lost, translators struggle to increase their prices in the face of the AI challenger. This pressure on translators’ incomes jeopardises our ability to support ourselves in what is a highly precarious industry.”

[...]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Surely the quality of translation will not suffer. No way that's going to happen, nuh uh!

If the quality was actually really good, I'd be less concerned about it, though. If translating well actually just becomes easier, you'd be a fool to not make use of that - would you pay 1000€ for a book that was copied by hand with pen and paper?

[–] levzzz 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

LLMs are decent at translating nowadays. As an example, there used to be no proper working translator for toki pona (a context-sensitive constructed language with extremely limited vocabulary and grammar), but now you can easily talk to most models in it.

Claude 3 opus was able to learn a dead language by just having a book about the language in its context window. (Can't find the source for this rn, but I remember reading about it)

Also, models can translate small programs between programming languages too.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fiction books require a hire standard for translation, though. It doesn't just have to be 100% factually accurate to the source book (which I'm not convinced AI is capable of right now), but it has to be aesthetically pleasing on top of that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

LLM are already good at tone for letters etc. As much as it may not be 100%, I’d say it’s close. Using flowery language is not necessarily better. However, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Dutch book translated to English. If this makes art more accessible across language barriers, I’m all for it.

load more comments (1 replies)