StoryOrigin Webinar - How Indie Authors Are Using AI Translations to Go Global

Connor, a founder of AI Novel Translation, recently sat down with Evan, founder of StoryOrigin, for a live webinar with hundreds of indie authors on AI-powered book translation. We unfortunately forgot to hit record... but Evan kindly compiled a quick summary for his extensive community that we've pasted below.

Find this of interest? Let us know and we'll consider exploring a part 2 (and maybe remember to record this time...)

How did Connor get into creating software to translate novels?

Connor started to learn Chinese back in college and started reading books in Chinese. He learned about the wider world of translating Chinese novels into English. A few years after graduating, he got into software development and predictive analytics/machine learning. After ChatGPT 3.5 came out, he decided to pursue the idea of combining his interests in programming and language.

Fun aside: Connor and I go way back. We ran a student org together in college, and we were both interested in entrepreneurship.

If you translate a novel with AI, how can you validate it?

A lot of authors still incorporate a human in the loop. The AI will create a draft, a translator will read it, and check for clarity / consistency.

However, the AI models are also getting so good that you can tell the model to check the translation to see if anything is worded poorly and the 2nd pass with AI will correct the issues.

This also allows authors to translate their novel, share with a reader in the target language (not a translator), and get their feedback.

How has the translation market changed?

Translators used to charge $/word, and now a lot of translators are now charging $/hr, because AI has become the default for translations, and translators act more as editors.

What languages should authors target?

The models are good at translating any languages where a large body of text is easily accessible, for example: French, German, Spanish, Chinese, etc.

From there, it's usually best to target the languages with large markets for indie authors, like German and French.

What about dialects?

You can tell the model to translate specifically to a dialect like British English or American English.

If you have a subset of characters that speak in a different dialect, you can also specify that.

Can I just use ChatGPT to translate my novel?

Not really. If you try to copy/paste your entire book in ChatGPT, it will start to hallucinate and you'll also lose all of your formatting (bold, italics, etc.).

You can try to solve this by only translating a bit at a time, but you'll still lose your formatting and you'll run into a different set of problems (e.g. translating the same place/name differently across sections, losing the dialect of a subset of characters, etc.)

Also, if you use the chatgpt.com interface for translating your novel, they will train on that data.

Does the author still own the copyright on the translation?

Disclaimer: not a lawyer. When you write a book, you own the copyright on the characters and the words. When you generate text with an AI model, it's not generally considered copyrighted; however, you still own the copyright on the characters.

It's helpful to think about fan-fiction. Anyone can write stories involving your characters, but they can't sell those stories. When you translate your novel to another language, you don't own the copyright of those words per se, but you still own the copyright to the characters.

How do you avoid having your work being trained on?

If you use the AI companies' APIs, most of them have explicitly said they don't train on that data. So, you need to use a software that calls their APIs directly.

How does AINovelTranslation.com fit into this picture?

Here's a quick step-by-step of how it works:

You select a target language/dialect

Upload your EPUB/DOCX file

It will give you an estimate of the cost to translate it

The software will automatically generate a glossary of terms to translate those the same way every time (e.g. place names, names of groups/organizations, etc.)

Runs it through the translation process

Runs the translated version through an editor

Outputs your new document

How much does it cost?

Pricing is based on the character count of the document (i.e. how many letters, numbers, and punctuation marks there are). 300K characters (about the length of a 50K word book) would be ~$26.

Where do I get more info?

You can check it out at ainoveltranslation.com or email us at support@ainoveltranslation.com.

Thanks so much to Evan and StoryOrigin for hosting the Q&A!