I also don't want books translated by big autocorrect. AI translation software is only as good as all the human translations already fed into it; but translation is about encountering new texts, with new and distinctive peculiarities, and deploying our linguistic knowledge in new ways

yeah there's just no way LLMs can do translation w/o making more errors than they're worth--as Google translate regularly proves. Better than nothing, but not ready for publication!

Consider the vast size of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. 50 years to compile 17 volumes of eccentric vocabulary variations, and that's just from *British sources*

Autocorrect can't even tell if I'm cursing or talking about mallards. It is not to be trusted with anything more important.

AI translation is, in fact, both better _and_ worse than all human translations fed into it because it also knows about relationships between words within the input and within the output languages. This can both improve translations and lead to so-called hallucination 😊

But also there's the mundane technical issue: a human translator who has lived in the language community will have a more up-to-date knowledge of colloquial speech and references than a system working from (necessarily) older text.