By Philip Oltermann
Publication Date: 2026-05-08 04:00:00
In February 2022, while busy translating US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed some relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of a job.
Gentric struggled with a short nonverbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings as he opened a window: “Bright, sharp night air, invigorating.” He entered the prompt into DeepL, a neural network-powered machine translation engine that consistently outperforms Google Translate in accuracy ratings.
The suggested translation was reassuring in terms of his job security: The air of the night, alive and alive, lives alive (The night air, brisk and lively, was invigorating.) AI had translated the meaning of the sentence, but was apparently unaware that the repetitions made the line absurd. It was vastly inferior to his own translation, published in the book a year later: The pure and piquant air of the night…
