When Frank Wynne’s translation of Michel Houellebecq‘s 1998 novel Atomised was published, in 2000 a reader complained to Wynne that he found the writing “very flat”. “I replied, you have no idea how hard I worked to get it down!” says Wynne of a novel whose nihilistic view of everyday life is incorporated into the prose. “The most important quality a translator needs is the ability to write,” he adds. “A lot of people say that Baudelaire‘s translations of Edgar Allen Poe are more interesting than the original. Translation is much more than just conveying meaning. You simply can’t exchange words and imagine that you’ll end up with the same thing.”
Yet this essential principle of literary translation, which advocates the primacy of creative representation over literal translation, may be on the verge of crumbling. This week, Veen Bosch & Keuning, the largest publishing house in the Netherlands, and a subsidiary of British publisher Simon and Schuster, announced that it will trial the use of AI in English editions of Dutch novels.
“There will be one editorial phase, and authors have been asked for permission for this,” a VBK spokesperson told the Bookseller. No explanation has been given for the decision, but it is almost certainly cost-related: Generative AI is currently free to use and is already widely used in translating technical material, meaning that most human technical translators are now virtually redundant. The company has emphasized that they are only testing commercial novels and have no plans to use AI in literary fiction.
Nevertheless, the news has sent a chill of fear through literary translators, who fear it marks the beginning of the end for translation as an art form. “AI doesn’t understand register or tone,” says Wynne, whose award-winning translations include Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder. ‘It is unable to understand whether a sentence is meant to be sarcastic, or what a change in tone might mean. Why would someone who has spent the time and energy carefully weighing every line and crafting every character abandon the task of communicating what he or she wants to say to a robot? He blames the publishing world for valuing the art of translation less and less.
“There is a fundamental inability to understand what literary translation is among English-language editors. It’s gruesome but not very surprising. We’ve gone from an industry where publishers are run by editors to an industry run by people who used to be supermarket marketing managers. These people today talk about books in terms of product and brand, so they will always try to reduce costs.”