Let me get one thing straight: I essentially hate artificial intelligence.
I don’t hate it for what it is, nor am I ignorant to the many positives it can introduce into the engineering, healthcare, IT, and business sectors. I simply fear and resent its advancements and endangerment of the arts — namely illustration, photography, writing, and potentially even music.
As I sat down to write a now scrapped post about how many books there are in the world that have yet to be translated from their original tongue into English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Indian (etc.) — it dawned on me that this may just be the one major benefit of A.I. involving itself in our novels and non-fiction books.
I share that optimism and excitement with some hesitation. Translation and language learning is something I have always respected, having tried my hand at German and French throughout high school and afterwards. To suddenly undo most of these translators’ hard work by letting A.I. language conversion do the main workload, and then have the humans simply refine it, feels insulting. Sure, on one hand, it saves the translator a lot of hassle — but it also tells them that they are now barely any more skilled than you or I (if we also had access to the same hypothetical A.I. tools as them).
Other than how it would directly affect the jobs, hiring, and necessity of translators, this A.I. idea does seem like a net positive. So many books, old or new, have failed to be enjoyed because they lack translations. Mieko Kawakami, whose works I really enjoy, had to wait over a decade for most of her novels to be translated into English (Sisters in Yellow is still pending for a 2025 release).
Her first two novels, Breast and Eggs and Heaven, really took off in the English market following that decade-long wait. They also had plenty of translations into other European languages, where they also performed well. Picture how many other authors and other works could be enjoyed by millions more if they were given the translation they so desperately need. Publishers and writers could be raking in profits and the acclaim they deserve, not to mention the simple reality that more books can be enjoyed by a greater amount of people across the globe.
Yet… I still find myself on the fence. Technological language translation is nothing new, and it’s only going to keep getting better with how rapidly A.I. is improving. Maybe you’re a non-English speaker reading this very text through an automated browser translator, which only gives credence to why ease of translation is such a massive positive.
I suppose I worry that us humans, with all our greed, laziness, and continual apathy, will just abuse translation A.I. once it gets good enough. I fear a world when translators are made almost redundant, alongside writers, artists, and everyone else left in this uncertain void by A.I.
At the very least, involving A.I. into books is a dangerous and sliding slope. We would have to ensure people aren’t passing off generated dribble as their own original stories, whilst also ensuring that translations are treated with the same care they always were. Even if machines start pulling some weight, their quality still isn’t going to be perfect or entirely human.
In essence, we need quality assurance, because A.I. is incapable of knowing what is artistically ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — it only knows how to replicate what we instruct it to do, without opinion or personality ever arising in that equation. We can only hope and pray that books never lose their human element.
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