Will you buy a book translated by AI?
January 15th, 2026
I have just heard from a colleague translator that Harper Collins France is replacing human book translators with AI for the romance books!
As an author, I find it appalling and disrespectful.
Several years ago, I translated my two books of the Raven Boy series into French. I did it myself because I have worked in the translation industry for years. Although I no longer do written translation professionally, I have a lot of experience in the field.
I have translated my books without using AI because a high-quality literary translation means rewriting the entire book in another language. Seriously. Replacing words by their equivalent in another language is absolutely not enough. Literary translation is a real creative and artistic process.
I have seen and tried AI for translating general documents and scientific stuff. It can bug; it often fails to find the right word, and sometimes it doesn’t grasp the meaning at all. And it totally can’t handle wordplay, allusions, hidden patterns, metaphors, or meaningfully translate names (for example, in Harry Potter this was very important; AI won’t ever be able to accomplish this).
Every fiction book is a work of art. It is the product of human imagination that comes from the author’s unique life experience, perspective, and emotions. The making of it is a creative process that involves a lot of thinking, feeling, revising, but also attention, the attention that has become the most valuable currency today.
AI doesn’t and can’t possibly have any of this.
Harper Collins France says that quality will not be affected because editors will review and correct AI-translated texts. But it will.
This exact situation has already occurred in the general translation. In order to pay less, clients started running their texts through AI translators and hiring human translators only for editing. Translators found themselves doing pretty much the same work as before (completely rewriting the text after AI) but for significantly lower pay, often 5 to 10 times less.
It worked the first time because the translators weren’t careful enough. But then everyone adjusted—who would do the same work as yesterday for a salary that is 5 to 10 times lower?
Good translators stopped taking this work completely or accepted it for what it was originally—minor editing, like correcting grammar and what is glaringly contradictory to the original sense. Without looking at the tone, style, metaphors, and all the subtleties that create this delightful emotional experience that a fiction book should offer.
That’s what will happen to Harper Collins books as well. They won’t get something as bad as “women underwear” translated as “underwear for virgos” (one of my clients really had that!), but the emotional taste of these new books won’t be the same.
So I totally understand the outrage of my colleagues-writers who don’t have a no-AI clause in their publishing contracts.
I will personally translate my new time-travel fantasy romance, A Forgotten Prince, into French. And then, probably next year, I will hire a human literary translator to do the Korean version.
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Categories: Miscellaneous