More than sixty Portuguese translators, writers, publishers and booksellers are denouncing the use of artificial intelligence tools in translations and are calling for regulatory measures to protect works and professionals.
“This editorial policy is directly responsible for the real impoverishment of these professionals and for the general decline of publishers and booksellers, as well as doing a disservice to readers, writers, but also, and above all, to the Portuguese language,” say the signatories of the open letter published today in the Público newspaper.
They stress that “in view of the worrying figures on reading habits in Portugal” it is urgent that the recently sworn-in government and “in particular the new Minister of Culture, Dalila Rodrigues”, pay special attention to regulation and transparency in the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the publishing sector.
The open letter calls for publishers to be legally obliged to indicate the source of any translation, making it explicit on the frontispiece of books, and calls for the creation of mechanisms to encourage the funding and publication of translations that are not artificially generated.
The document is signed, among others, by Frederico Lourenço, historian and translator; writers Afonso Reis Cabral, Manuel Alegre, Luísa Costa Gomes, Richard Zenith, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Richard Zimler; university professors and historians Diogo Ramada Curto and António Araújo (Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation) and António Feijó, president of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
In addition to reviewers, booksellers and journalists, the open letter is signed by publishers Bárbara Bulhosa (Tinta-da-China), Carlos Vaz Marques (Zigurate), Dinis Machado (Poets andDragons Society) Francisco José Viegas (Quetzal), Isabel Minhós Martins (Planeta Tangerina), Maria do Rosário Pedreira (Leya), Rosa Azevedo (Snob), Rui Couceiro (Contraponto) and Vasco Santos (VS).
The letter states that the translation of books using artificial intelligence programs (ChatGPT and DeepL) “has been increasingly used in certain sectors of Portuguese publishing, without warning to readers.
The “certain sectors” are not specified in the open letter.
For the signatories, “it is normal that there are translators who use machine translation programs to carry out stages of their work,” but they add that the concealment of the use of tools as the main or almost exclusive translation tool, “which turns translators into machine-generated language proofreaders, cannot be ignored.”
“In many of these cases, the books translated by these tools disrespect the author’s codes, infringing elementary editorial rules: the technical sheets do not indicate the original title of the work, nor the language from which it is translated, nor the names of the translators and proofreaders,” they accuse.
“Translations made from scratch using machine translation programs imply an undeniable decline in the quality of the works. These editions contain spelling and grammar mistakes, a mixture of spelling agreements, Brazilian terms and various idiomatic inconsistencies,” the signatories add.
The names behind the open letter stress that translating requires highly variable interpretative decisions and choices, the quality of which depends on specialized knowledge, experience and “a poetic vision” and the consequences are “regrettable” for readers.
“This method of translation also has serious repercussions in terms of employment. Since the works produced in this way dispense with the translator’s task, the proofreader’s work is double: not only does he have to proofread, but he also has to re-translate a text that is not the result of anyone’s thinking, receiving in return the lowest pay of the two services, which worsens an already precarious situation,” the signatories also accuse.
