The Human Touch: Can AI and Translators Coexist in Europe's Publishing Industry?

A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet. In 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 experiment was a wake-up call for Gentric, who had always prided himself on his attention to detail and linguistic nuance. But as he compared the output from DeepL with his own translation, he realized that while AI had made tremendous progress, it still had its limitations.

The machine-translated text was accurate, but it lacked the subtlety and context that a human translator could provide. For Gentric, the test reinforced the importance of human intuition and cultural understanding in translation. “Being human helps,” he said, reflecting on the experience.

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by many in the translation industry, who argue that while AI can be a useful tool, it’s no substitute for human judgment and expertise. As the publishing industry continues to evolve, it’s clear that translators will need to adapt to new technologies and workflows. But for now, at least, it seems that human translators will remain in demand.

Whether AI will eventually supplant them remains to be seen – but for now, Gentric and his colleagues are still very much in the driving seat.