I had an enquiry recently about a book that was written in a foreign language. The writer had found me on BlueSky and was considering two approaches to getting the book out there. The first was to find a professional translator to work on it. The second was to use machine translation post editing (MTPE) and then have a professional copyeditor work on it.
As a professional translator who recently lost a lot of work to MTPE, I have feelings about this! But I also have eight-plus years of experience of working with MTPE, i.e. editing text that has been machine-translated, alongside traditional copyediting, proofreading and translation work. I feel pretty confident in knowing what it can and can’t do well.
This book also sounded wonderful – if the writer’s language was a language I offer for translation, I’d have jumped at the opportunity to translate it. And I also knew I’d probably love copyediting it. Sometimes you just know a book is a great fit.
With all of that in mind, here’s the gist of my reply to the author, edited to preserve their anonymity.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
In terms of the translation approach, I would be very careful if you go with MTPE. It’s obviously more economical, but in my experience machine translation can introduce errors and inconsistencies (for example, at one point referring to a town as a town, and then the next time as a village or a conglomeration), and these are sometimes easy to miss, because the text looks decent at first glance. In my professional opinion, machine translation works less well for literary writing (even if it’s non-fiction), because the writing is more lyrical and metaphorical (so words don’t always mean exactly what a machine might think they mean).
Another danger with machine translation is that the text may read as “good enough”, but it might not reflect your true voice. So it might require substantial rewriting to make it sound like you.
That said, it’s possible your English will be good enough to check this yourself and pick up on a lot of things – and certainly, since I have experience with MTPE and translations in general, I would be able to keep an eye out for issues like this during copyediting.
If you were to use a professional translator, this would probably be more expensive and it would be harder to find someone who is the right fit – but the final quality in English would probably be better, if you find the right person for the work. (It’s also worth mentioning that you would want to clarify with the translator how/whether they use translation tools, for the reasons I’ve outlined above. Most translators will be transparent about this.)
Further on in the process, if you find a publisher they will have their own copyeditors and proofreaders. If you use a professional translator and then self-publish, I’d suggest at the very least using a proofreader once you have the finished manuscript back from the translator. Depending on the translator, I’d suggest using a copyeditor as well.
As a guide, I would charge more for copyediting if machine translation were involved.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, there are a lot of emotive issues surrounding the actual question of what to do here. I am coming to this from the perspective of someone who was more or less forced to use MTPE as a translator working with large agencies (i.e. it was a choice between adopting it or losing them as clients, and at that time they represented the vast majority of my income). So I’m experienced at working with MTPE text, but that doesn’t mean I’m always happy to use it. A human-translated text is almost always better, in my experience. It’s also a lot more expensive.
I know many editors will refuse to work on a text that has been created by AI – but what about when it has been created by a human but translated by AI? And what about the nuance from the author’s perspective: if you’ve written a book in a language that not many people speak, and you want to bring it to a wider audience, how do you find the right people to work on it? This book has come from your heart. Ideally you’d find a translator who can take it to their heart, too. But if you can’t, perhaps a combination of your own skills, MTPE and a skilled copyeditor who loves your book is the best option?
I suspect this kind of enquiry is going to become more common in future. I’d love to hear from other editors and translators: how do you respond or how would you respond in this situation? And are there any writers out there who have used one or other of these approaches?
Better World Words 