AI is flooding the online book market with poor translations – here’s how to spot them

A surge of AI-generated translations is crowding online bookstores, sold as professional work without clear disclosure. The Conversation reports on this growing phenomenon, featuring insights from Terry Bradford, a published translator and lecturer in French and translation at the University of Leeds. Bradford discovered the problem firsthand when she purchased a Jules Verne novel marketed as a modern translation but featuring archaic style and poor presentation. Professional translators invest months or years perfecting a single work; AI-assisted translations, which can reproduce outdated stereotypes without sensitivity, push that crafted work to the margins of the marketplace. For buyers, Bradford identifies warning signs: unsophisticated book design, translator names with no verifiable online presence, self-published formatting, and prose that reads archaic rather than modern.

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