As investment into AI reaches mind-boggling figures, with hedge funds run by 23-year-olds, some say we’re destined for a devastating market crash. (Here is one such manifesto that pulls no punches and might tempt you to modify your investment portfolio.) Even if we are in a bubble and AI has become terribly overhyped, it can simultaneously be true that every sector will be shaped in unique and transformative ways by AI. And I believe people working inside their industries are in the best position to know how AI can serve their human goals. I trust AI publishing startups more when they come from people in the publishing trenches who understand the pain points of the industry and aren’t shouting about disruption or revolution. Rather, they focus on opportunities for publishers and authors to better execute their mission: getting books into more readers’ hands.
GlobeScribe, from the founders of the UK publisher Bloodhound Books, is a new startup focused on AI translation. Bloodhound was founded in 2014 as a digital-first publisher and was acquired by Open Road Media in 2021. The founders, Betsy Reavley and Fred Freeman, in fact continue to work as part of Open Road, but they will officially depart at the end of this month to focus full-time on GlobeScribe.
When I first heard news of the launch, I knew from experience exactly what would happen next: widespread concern and condemnation from translators, anti-AI people, and others who simply don’t trust the technology (or the people behind it). But you don’t have to be a futurist or tech bro to recognize AI’s market-shifting potential in two publishing arenas: audiobook narration and translation. Without AI, both have formidable costs, and many titles don’t reach the sales required to make either translation or audiobook narration feasible. That economic equation changes with AI.
GlobeScribe isn’t the first industry effort to use AI to support translations. Last year, I reported on Nuanxed, a European firm founded in 2021 that offers project management for translations for traditional publishers. They use a hybrid process that includes the use of AI tools before, during, and after translation. While there was skepticism at first, both publishers and translators ultimately realized that the quality is good, readers like it, and authors like it. Without AI, the founder of Nuanxed argued that the only books that get translated are obvious bestsellers and passion projects. That is the same argument I heard from GlobeScribe’s founders when I spoke with them last week.
“One of the things that we saw over the years [at BloodHound] was how few of our titles were actually picked up in translation. A lot of the time it was cost and time related. We weren’t a big publisher … and we didn’t have the budget to pay for every single one of our titles to be translated into multiple languages. It just was a nonstarter for us,” Reavley says. “So we originally started looking at [AI translation] from a Bloodhound perspective, how we could make the most out of our older titles that had never been picked up before and that deserved to reach a wider audience.” Reavley, a bestselling author herself, describes a “class break” between those who see their books in translation—typically well-established and wealthy authors—and those who don’t. She and Freeman want to eliminate the barriers and create a more even playing field.
GlobeScribe offers AI-powered translations for five languages: Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), and French. Freeman says, “There are other people offering this service, but a lot of what the other people are doing, they are offering 20, 30, or 40 languages. I struggle to see how they can, at this stage, achieve really positive results in culturally nuanced languages. The five languages we are offering, we have done a lot of testing on, across a broad range of genres. And we think the results are very, very good for almost all fiction and narrative nonfiction. Very highly literary works, it may not be the best service for—it may potentially lose something.”
Publishers and authors have expressed enthusiasm for the service and are testing it, but Freeman says, “People aren’t necessarily at a stage where they are willing to advocate for it publicly.” This continues to be a frustrating dynamic for those interested in transparency and open discussion about AI use. But publishers don’t want to deal with the blowback that inevitably occurs, plus many uses of AI remain in testing phase or are otherwise tentative.
For authors in particular, GlobeScribe is accessible and affordable, at $100 per book per language. In the past, a big translation hurdle for authors has been ascertaining whether the translation is any good. Some authors have published their translations only to remove them from retail distribution after receiving bad reviews over quality. Reavley says that if authors try GlobeScribe and are unhappy with the translation, “They’re very welcome to come back to us and have that discussion. But we wouldn’t have launched a business that we weren’t confident is putting out decent-quality translations. We know as a publisher the value of reviews and how they can make or break a book.”
Freeman says that in their testing, the AI-generated translations are “publish ready.” Some of their publisher clients already use generic AI tools for a first translation draft, then employ humans to clean it up. Those publishers are now looking at GlobeScribe to replace that workflow because it’s better. “They might give it a light proofread in order to align with house style. That’s the kind of feedback we’ve been getting.” But he understands that, from a peace-of-mind perspective, it may make sense for authors to find someone to scan through a couple of chapters before publication.
In an example of responding to user feedback, Freeman says GlobeScribe translated an LGBTQ romance, but that wasn’t a category the system had yet worked on, and it messed up the pronouns. “The user came back and said, ‘Hey, this isn’t right.’ We were able to speak to the technical team about How can we train the system to handle these properly? And we were able to fix it and rerun the translation for that customer. And they were very happy with the results.”
Can you get the same quality translation from ChatGPT or an off-the-shelf AI tool? Freeman says your average chatbot can do a perfectly good translation for a short passage, but it won’t work well for an entire manuscript. “Without really exceptional knowledge about prompting, prompt engineering, about genre-specific prompting, I think the results would be poor, and I think it would lead to very literal translations of idioms. I think it would lead to cultural references being lost. Things like jokes wouldn’t translate well. … We built our system to handle that nuance, to keep the same literary style as the original, and to go well beyond literal translation. Human translators are not literally translating word for word. They are retelling that story in a way that’s going to be as if it’s written in that language to begin with. And that’s what we’ve tried to achieve with GlobeScribe.”
Are the results protected under copyright law? I don’t believe they would be protected under US law as it currently stands, since wholly AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright protection. Freeman tells me, “It’s an interesting and evolving area, and one we’ve put a lot of thought into. As a UK-based company, we operate under the law of England and Wales, where AI-generated translations can be protected under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. We assign those rights in full to our customers through a robust copyright agreement, giving them clarity and confidence over ownership. While the legal position differs in some jurisdictions, our contractual framework has been readily accepted by clients in many markets and has not been an obstacle in practice.”
Bottom line: Back when I reported on Nuanxed, the founder said that unedited AI translations were really a different market and served a different purpose, because only about 20 percent of the sentences in an unedited translation don’t need to be touched. Based on my conversation with GlobeScribe, it appears AI has progressed beyond that, or perhaps GlobeScribe has simply developed a better-trained model for the languages they handle. This week, they released unedited and unproofread AI translations of public domain classics so anyone can see for themselves just how remarkable the tools are. Freeman says, “We’re not trying to hide anything, and we’re not total AI evangelists. We don’t think AI is going to solve everything.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
