AI for Book Translation

I hosted a webinar on AI for book translation, sponsored by BISG, in June 2024. The video is online on YouTube.

The subject is complex and nuanced. One thing I find fascinating is how long people have been trying to automate translation. It’s a reminder that books, which fill our universe, are such a small proportion of written communication, even more so in this online age.

Warren Weaver, credited as the father of machine translation (MT), noted to a colleague, “When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’” For a machine, language is just a code. It’s not culture and feeling and the grandeur of written language. It’s a task where letters can be converted to numbers.

Clearly the fiction/nonfiction divide will loom large in AI translation. Chat AI is strong on style, but it can fall short on facts. Literary fiction is the elephant in the room. It is precious and revered and rightly so. Translators can spend hours arguing about a single word or phrase. Chat AI must tread cautiously in those waters.

But this is fertile territory. As far as I can determine (from scant data), there were only 9,500 trade book translations into English in 2023. Even if I’m off by a large factor, it’s clear that few books are being translated from foreign languages into English.

Similarly, I found a statistic indicating that in 2023 there were only 7,230 translations from English into Spanish (in Spanish book markets). That seems ludicrously small. (And, according to a colleague in Spain, is a significant underestimate. But still…)

There’s a vast opportunity here.

Most of the use of AI for book translation will be for books where translation was never considered economically feasible. There is bound to be a job impact on translators of “mid-market” books; the job growth will be managing projects and in QA. Will that offset the job loss? Unlikely.

As with most aspects of AI, there are complex challenges to be addressed, and no easy answers.

As noted above, Leanpub and DeepL are two companies offering AI-assisted book translation services. Audible’s May 2025 announcement, referenced above, brings translation also to audiobooks.