Faithful to what?

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?

When people think about translation, they often imagine a simple spectrum whose two extremes are literal fidelity and free adaptation. It is an intuitive way of framing the problem, but one that begins to unravel as soon as we turn to some of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers on translation.

Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most famous advocate of uncompromising fidelity to the original text. For him, the translator's duty was to preserve every nuance, every ambiguity, every peculiarity of the source, even when doing so produced a translation that sounded unfamiliar, awkward, or resistant to the expectations of the target language. His monumental translation of Eugene Onegin, accompanied by hundreds of pages of philological notes, embodies this philosophy better than any theoretical essay. As he famously wrote:

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

For Nabokov, elegance was always secondary to precision.

Walter Benjamin approached the question from an entirely different direction. In The Task of the Translator, he argues that a translation is not simply a reproduction of an original work for readers who cannot access it, but a new stage in the work's existence, an event that reveals relationships between languages which remain invisible in the original alone. His celebrated formulation captures this idea:

A translation issues from the original, not so much from its life as from its afterlife.

Every genuine translation extends the life of a text, allowing it to unfold in ways that neither language could achieve independently.

At first glance these positions appear irreconcilable. Nabokov seems obsessed with the text itself, Benjamin with the metaphysical destiny of language. Yet beneath their differences lies a striking point of agreement: neither believes that the translator's highest goal is simply to produce a version that reads as though it had originally been written in the target language. For Nabokov, the foreignness of the original deserves to remain perceptible; for Benjamin, the translation should preserve the productive tension between languages, allowing the original to resonate within the new text rather than disappear behind it.

Their ideas remain surprisingly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. For decades, machine translation systems have largely been optimized for fluency, smoothing away ambiguities, regularizing syntax, and normalizing stylistic irregularities in order to produce text that feels immediately natural to its readers. While this approach works remarkably well for many practical purposes, literary translation often demands precisely the opposite. An ambiguity may be deliberate, a repeated word may carry structural significance, and an unusual rhythm may express something that cannot be paraphrased without loss.

This understanding shaped the way we designed TranswrAIte. Rather than treating AI as an automatic replacement for the translator, we built it as a tool whose behaviour can be guided according to different philosophies of translation. The translator can control the model's degree of freedom, provide stylistic instructions, build a translation guide that preserves recurring choices, and review every suggestion before publication, because no single approach is universally right.

Some books call for Nabokov's relentless fidelity to every detail, while others invite Benjamin's vision of translation as the continuing life of a work in another language. The translator's craft lies in recognizing which kind of faithfulness a particular text requires, and AI should help make that decision possible, not make it on the translator's behalf.