What happens when the language you are translating does not quite exist?
Teofilo Folengo’s macaronic verse looks like Latin, behaves partly like Latin, and poses a revealing challenge for AI-assisted literary translation.
Field Notes
Notes on language, literature, artificial intelligence, and building TranswrAIte.
How to evaluate an AI book translation without losing narrative voice
A narrator describes a kitchen as “neat.” Elsewhere, the same room is “orderly,” “tidy,” and “immaculate.” Each choice may be defensible in isolation. Across a novel, however, the variation can alter the narrator’s…
What the decline of professional translation tells us about designing AI translation for books.
AI translation is changing the economics of professional work—and exposing a crucial design choice about where human attention belongs.
The Book Is Yours. The Translation Should Be Too.
AI has made book translation cheaper and faster—but authors should ask who owns, controls, and can revise the translated edition when the machine finishes.
"The Martian" Had One Advantage You Probably Don’t
Andy Weir could test his novel directly in the world’s largest literary market. For writers outside English, translation has always been the gate before the gate.
Baudelaire Goes to the Model Arena: Literary Translation
Nine AI translation pipelines, four languages, one magnificently unpleasant poem—and a Silver model that beat Gold.
The Day ChatGPT Beat Shakespeare (And Why That's Not the Story)
Readers preferred AI-generated poems to canonical poetry—but the most revealing result may be what the experiment tells us about reading itself.
Nabokov, Benjamin, and the Biggest Question in AI Translation
What does fidelity really mean when translating literature—and what should we ask of AI when there is no single right answer?