HarperCollins Will Use AI To Translate Harlequin Romance Novels (404media.co) 31
Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher's Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone) -- an anti-AI activist group of French translators -- HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they're being replaced with machines in 2026.
The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to "reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions."
The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to "reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions."
What about lost context? (Score:2)
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The summary says the translations will be checked and finalized by humans.
Hell, next year they'll write a story framing the human part as a big scandal proving that the AI is dumb and the company is trying to trick everybody into being impressed its technology when it's actually part mechanical turk.
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One open is simply proofreading.
If you want to automate more, you can try multiple things. First, modern LLM have quite large context, so your problem is only if some in-joke from long before gets lost. One can already see this in human translated media. I've seen for example horrible translations of jokes from the Simpsons. Second, you could try doing several passes. First process it chapter by chapter letting the agent create a markdown document containing summaries, persons, in-jokes, etc. and then run t
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Just leaving this here.
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Stupid typos confirm you're not a LLM. I'd add an em dash to confuse you, but Slashdot thinks Unicode is witchcraft.
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In my experience, LLMs can be really good at translating books, especially if a human proof reads the results and explains some of the context to them.
Oh. (Score:2)
I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.
If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.
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This was a case a couple of years ago.
About a year ago, LLMs got really good at translations. They get most metaphors, and they're decent at writing.
Lately, it's probably on par with average human translator and way better than best "localizers". This is why you now find a metric shit ton of Japanese and Chinese games on Steam, and you can track translation quality vs time scale and LLM used. ChatGPT v3 were meh. V4 was ok. V5 is getting pretty good. And that's the general model for very different languages
Weird to be doing it in France (Score:2)
Still sucks that it's another career path that's basically gone now.
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I man with Google translate being like 20 years old ... it's nothing translators weren't warned about. I think in 2019 Google started using LLM for translate and the translation (and grammar checking) services have seen people leaving since ChatGPT got popular.
There is real value in translators (Score:3)
I wouldn't call myself bilingual, but my experience is that there are lots of nuances that an author imbues their work with, based on choosing various turns of phrase. Learning to see, understand and translate the author's intent is a learned skill. I question whether AI is yet capable of discerning the author's intent.
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Last versions of ChatGPT are pretty good at it even for Japanese and Chinese to English translations.
It also is worth mentioning that ChatGPT V4 was so good at generating "women's romance novels" on the fly with the AI boyfriends, that when V5 came out and was way less flowery and affirming in its language, there was a massive movement of women to bring V4 back. They got it too.
I.e. V4 was very, very good at not just translating, but writing this sort of stuff from the scratch already.
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In general? Not at all. AI is utter crap at subtlety, at context and at identifying what is important and what is not. But these "writings" are essentially porn for women. I doubt there is lots of nuances in there and I expect it will be just a few "concepts" used over and over again. So, yes the translation will be crap. But it may not actually be worse than the originals.
and--enternity in an hour (Score:4, Funny)
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AI translation is bad (Score:2)
My work uses AI to transcribe meetings. It has frequent mistakes, which nobody notices because nobody that attended the meeting looks at the minutes immediately after the meeting.
And we see similar problems with translation software. It makes an error, and with no human willing to proofread it, errors slip in. And it's not like a simple typo, it can be totally strange nonsense.
When you use AI to drive both the cost and quality of your products to zero. Don't be surprised if consumers stop showing up to buy
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That is why they will employ a proof reader as the story mentions.
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I covered that in my post. Won't work.
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You're arguing against something that has already been done successfully for years in things like narrative driven games that tend to have far more text than smut novels.
Cuts out the middlemen (Score:4, Interesting)
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True. My wife used to work as a translator, and still does bits here and there. There have long been tools to assist translators. The "cheap" translators just take the output and submit it. The results are...poor. The good translators use tools only as an aid or maybe a first step. Even though AI is better than the old tools, it still does make mistakes, and it is missing the larger context that a good translator will have familiarized themselves with.
Of course, the problem is that a good translator costs
I've found AI to be good at translation (Score:3, Informative)
Not only is AI pretty good at translation, but romance novels don't require exceptional translations because they are written at a junior high school level, so that the kind of people who buy them can read them. (Americans, that is.)
Seriously though, they really aren't complex, so AI translation will work fine. It's not like you're talking about poetry, it's just soft core porn with a stupid story.
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I have found AI capable of producing translations that sound good, sometimes better than the input. But I have also found loss of context, loss of important detail, completely borked references to real-world things, drastic shifts in emphasis, etc. AI translates without understanding. That may be enough for "girl porn", but it is not enough for anything that requires insight or understanding from the reader.
The sort of people that read Harlequin books (Score:3)
I don't think they'll notice. The books are effectively machine generated anyways.
this calls for a bodice riot (Score:2)
En Chair et en Os agents should start riots, flip cars, set them on fire. Wearing ripped bodices, of course.
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Bad translation is easy, good translation is hard (Score:2)
I live in a country where English is taught in school, as kids first foreign language. Most media gets translated - movies and series get translated and subtitled, with the original audio intact. Therefore I often experience the same media in both English and my native language.
I don't know much about actual romance novels, but the stereotype in media is that they would be full of double entendres, silly metaphors and puns.
Those are precisely the things that when they are translated badly -- it gets very no
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the stereotype in media is that they would be full of double entendres, silly metaphors and puns.
I've read a whole one romance novel (I read really fast, and I was really bored) and it had none of that. It had a lot of emotional bullshit and some boring sex.
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Machine translation gets very basic stuff wrong (Score:3)
A great example is that in languages like Viet and Korean, pronouns depend on the speaker's relationship to each other. None of the machine translation tools can get this right in either direction, even when given a passage with plenty of context to know the appropriate pronouns to use. They won't even use consistent pronouns throughout a single paragraph.
This could be an improvement (Score:2)