Dutch publisher to use AI to translate ‘limited number of books’ into English

A major Dutch publisher plans to trial translating books into English using artificial intelligence.

Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) – the largest publisher in the Netherlands, acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year – is “using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of books”, Vanessa van Hofwegen, commercial director at VBK said.

“This project contains less than 10 titles – all commercial fiction. No literary titles will nor shall be used. This is on an experimental basis, and we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future,” she added.

“There will be one editing phase, and authors have been asked to give permission for this,” a VBK spokesperson told the Bookseller. “We are not creating books with AI, it all starts and ends with human action.”

The fact that the publisher is planning to use AI translation only for commercial fiction, rather than literary titles, “assumes those books are purely formulaic and don’t contain many creative elements, which is rather insulting to the authors and readers involved”, said Michele Hutchison, who won the 2020 International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening.

“There’s only so far you can get” with machine translation post-editing – the process by which a human translator reviews an AI-generated translation. “The text might be superficially smooth but it is also likely to be very bland,” she added.

“Taking the translator out of the loop opens the door to incorrect or misleading translations that will serve readers poorly,” said David McKay, a literary translator who translates from Dutch into English. He added that while it is understandable that publishers want to use new technologies to “increase their efficiency”, VBK’s plans “sound very reckless”.

“If I were one of Veen Bosch & Keuning’s authors, I would be very worried about how these AI translations will reflect on my work and affect my reputation.”

Ian Giles, co-chair of the Society of Authors’ (SoA) Translators Association, called the news “concerning”, pointing to an SoA survey published earlier this year which found that over a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI.

If VBK “feels the need to consult human translators or editors to adjust” the AI-generated output, “they are recognising the flaws in this approach.”