A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet
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n February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.
Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.
The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening.) AI had translated the sentence’s meaning but was seemingly unaware that the repetitions rendered the line absurd. It was far inferior to his own translation that would be published in the book a year later: L’air pur et piquant de la nuit, vivifiant.
