Tackling idioms, cultural references, and ambiguous phrases in AI-powered book translation.
At LectuLibre, we’ve been working on an AI-powered book translation service. One of the toughest challenges we ran into wasn’t the straightforward sentences — it was the non-standard text: idioms, metaphors, cultural references, and ambiguous phrases that machine translation consistently butchers. We needed a way to not only translate these correctly but also let users verify and edit the translations, because in literary works, getting them wrong breaks the entire reading experience.
That’s how we built our 非标准文本翻译与含义确认 (non‑standard text translation and meaning confirmation) feature. It’s a pipeline that detects tricky sentences, proposes a contextual translation with a full meaning explanation, and gives users a final say. Here’s the engineering story, warts and all.
The Problem
Standard LLM translation does an impressive job on factual, literal text. But when a book says “it’s raining cats and dogs” it could be rendered as “raining animals” in the target language, which is either brilliant or absurd depending on context. Idioms often carry cultural weight that a simple word‑for‑word translation misplaces. Additionally, metaphors and ambiguous phrases can have multiple valid interpretations. For a translator, understanding the intent behind the phrase is half the work.
