Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work.Publisher\u2019s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone)\u2014an anti-AI activist group of French translators\u2014HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they\u2019re being replaced with machines in 2026.<\/p>\n
The ATFL\/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to \u201creaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions.\u201dHarperCollins France did not return 404 Media\u2019s request for comment, but told Publisher\u2019s Weekly that \u201cno Harlequin collection has been translated solely using machine translation generated by artificial intelligence.\u201d In its statement, it explained that the company turned to AI translations because Harlequin\u2019s sales had declined in France.\u00a0\u201cWe want to continue offering readers as many publications as possible at the current very low retail price, which is \u20ac4.99 for the Azur series, for example,\u201d the statement said. \u201cWe are therefore conducting tests with Fluent Planet, a French company specializing in translation for 20 years: this company uses experienced translators who utilize artificial intelligence tools for part of their work.\u201dAccording to Fluent Planet\u2019s website, its translators \u201cstudied at the best translation universities or have decades of experience under their belt.\u201d These human translators are aided by a proprietary translation agent Fluent Planet called BrIAn.\u00a0\u201cWhen compared to standard machine translation systems that use neural networks, BrIAn can provide 2 to 3 times higher quality translations, that are more accurate, offer idiomatic phrasing, provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and a faithful representation of the style and emotions of the source text,\u201d the site said. \u201cBrIAn takes into account the author\u2019s tone and intention, making it highly effective for complex literary or marketing content.\u201dTranslation is a delicate work that requires deep knowledge of both languages. Nuances and subtleties\u2014two aspects of writing AIs are notoriously terrible at\u2014can be lost or deranged if not carefully considered during the translation process. Translation is not simply a substitution game. Idioms, jargon, and regional dialects come into play and need a human touch to work in another language. Even with humans, the results are never perfect.HarperCollins France is not the first major publisher to announce its giving some of its translation duties over to an AI. In March of 2025, UK Publisher Taylor & Francis announced plans to use AI to publish English-language books in other languages to \u201cexpand readership.\u201d The publisher promised AI-translated books would be \u201ccopyedited and then reviewed by Taylor & Francis editors and the books\u2019 authors before publication.\u201dIn a manifesto on its website, In Flesh and Bone begged readers to \u201csay no to soulless translations.\u201d\u201cThese generative programmes are fed with existing human works, mined as simple bulk data, without offering the authors the choice to give their consent or not,\u201d the manifesto said. \u201cFurthermore, the data processing remains dependent on an enormous amount of human labour that is invisibilized, often carried out in conditions that are appalling, underpaid, dehumanizing, even traumatizing (when content moderation is involved). Finally, the storage of the necessary data for the functioning and training of algorithms produces a disastrous ecological footprint in terms of carbon balance and energy consumption. What may appear as progress is actually leading to immense losses of expertise, cognitive skills, and intellectual capacity across all human societies. It paves the way for a soulless, heartless, gutless future, saturated with standardized content, produced instantaneously in virtually unlimited quantity. We are close to a point of no return that we would never forgive ourselves for reaching.\u201dThe translation of the manifesto from French to English was done by the collective themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"