AI translation of literary texts is "fine", but readers still prefer human translations
AI translation of literary works is increasingly common. While the content may be rendered adequately, we do not know enough about how readers experience it in terms of immersiveness and literary effect-aspects poorly captured by automatic metrics or human evaluation targeting fluency and adequacy. We ask 15 avid readers to compare recently published human translations (HT) to machine translations (MT) generated with an agentic language model-based pipeline, for 15 recent novels in French, Polish, and Japanese translated into English. Readers evaluated approximately 8K-word excerpts in two conditions: immersive reading of the whole excerpt (30 comparisons) and close reading of 386 aligned...
| Authors | Yves Ferstler, Adam Podoxin, Ty Brassington et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 September 2026 |
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