Taylor & Francis has announced plans to use AI to translate books into English from languages that the U.K.-based academic publisher said would otherwise have too small of an audience to justify the time and resources needed for human translation. The decision comes after what T&F described as a yearlong “program of rigorous testing” to assess the viability of the technology and ensure its accuracy.
“Taylor & Francis has a proud history of making outstanding books available in English for an international readership,” said Jeremy North, Taylor & Francis Books managing director, in a statement. “Our China Perspectives series is a good example of this, which now includes over 350 titles by leading Chinese scholars. However, we have always been aware that our translations program represented just the tip of the iceberg, which is why we were keen to explore whether AI could help.”
The publisher will increase its range of translated titles published under its CRC Press and Routledge imprints across various fields, . All AI-translated manuscripts will undergo copyediting and review by T&F editors and the books’ authors before publication and will typically be published in print and ebook editions. The publisher will accept work in over 30 languages and use comprehensive glossaries to train the AI on technical terminology to maintain accuracy of meaning.
“We are interested in publishing translations of high-quality books across a broad range of advanced learning topics and formats, including academic monographs, textbooks and resources for practitioners,” Mark Robinson, corporate media relations manager for Taylor & Francis, told PW.
T&F argued that the new approach eliminates the need for authors to arrange translations before submitting proposals to T&F, reducing upfront costs. The publisher expects this will increase the impact of authors’ work and create new research collaboration opportunities.
“This new initiative, which we will be working on hand-in-hand with our regional publishing partners, is a very positive use of AI technology,” North added. “It promises to promote better understanding between cultures and accelerate awareness of the knowledge required to meet today’s challenges, regardless of where it is first published.”
T&F has confirmed that no AI-translated books have yet been published and told the Bookseller that the testing phase used traditionally translated books to “compare the quality and accuracy of the AI-produced translations.”
As reported by the Bookseller last year, T&F was among the first publishers to publicly announce that it had licensed work to AI companies, including Microsoft, for training, and did so without asking for permission or a promise of compensation or authors—a move that “shocked” the U.K. industry. T&F has since told the Bookseller that “rightsholders” including authors will be paid a share from its AI partnerships, although it hasn’t disclosed how much, in accordance with their contracts.
It is unclear at this time whether T&F holds translation rights for the works it intends to bring into English using AI, how those authors might be compensated, and how many titles this might cover. “The majority of translated titles are expected to be books that have already been published in their original language by a regional publisher,” Robinson explained. “We will be working very closely with our regional publishing partners and the authors of those books to bring their work to a global readership. In all cases we will follow the contractual process for securing English-language publishing rights.”
The U.K.’s Society of Authors quickly criticized T&F following the announcement, with Society of Authors CEO Anna Ganley telling the Bookseller that “AI-generated translation is just one of the ways that AI is presenting an existential threat to creators.” She continued: “The ‘advanced AI’ that Taylor & Francis is using is likely to have been trained on unlawfully scraped data. We do not agree with the ethics of using AI that has not been fairly trained.”
Ian Giles, chair of the Translators Association at the Society of Authors, added, “Last year, the SoA found that one third of literary translators are already losing work to AI. Where work itself is not lost, translators struggle to increase their prices in the face of the AI challenger.”
Consternation about the threat of AI taking translators jobs has been building since last year, and T&F’s news doesn’t come in isolation. For example, last year Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK), which Simon & Schuster acquired last year, revealed it had been experimenting with AI translation. At last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, S&S CEO Jonathan Karp said of the project, “VBK really has been innovative in the audio end. They’ve been a leader in that market in developing audio, creating podcasts, and books. The translation part of it really didn’t factor into our thinking very much, except in the general sense that as AI gets better, translation will get easier, and that could be a very exciting thing for all of our publishing companies.”
Noting that many VBK authors control their own rights, Karp continued: “There are a lot of potential benefits down the line. The larger question about innovation in the publishing business is about servicing the authors in a really clear, fair-minded way and communicating with them well enough so that they trust us.”
This article has been updated with additional information.