[tombarys]

I am a book publisher & I love technology. It can empower people. I have been using LLM chatbots since they became widely available. I regularly test machine translation at our publishing house in collaboration with our translators. I have just completed two courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning at my alma mater, Masaryk University, and I am training my own experimental models (for predicting bestsellers :). I consider machine learning to be a remarkable invention and catalyst for progress. Despite all this, I have my doubts.

[esjeon]

I know a publisher who translates books (English to Korean). He works alone these days. Using GPT, he can produce a decent-quality first draft within a day or two. His later steps are also vastly accelerated because GPT reliably catches typos and grammar errors. It doesn't take more than a month to translate and print a book from scratch. Marvelous.

But I still don't like that the same model struggles w/ my projects...

[tombarys]

This is a topic for another article! We tried hard to use (test) translation tools in some real-life scenarios. The results seemed like they can help first but then we spent a lot of time again to reach our standards. As a side-effect, our translators and editors felt they are losing their own creativity and sensitivity in that process.

We are a publisher which succeeded due to the highest-quality translations. Our readers appreciated it and ask for it. Czech language is very rich and these machines are not able to make the most of it. The non-fiction sphere needs a lot of fact-checking e.g. in local and field terminology too. So even we can imagine the process of translation could be technically shortened by machine translation, it would probably ruin our reputation in a long term.

At least for now...