i'm now requiring all my translation contracts to say explicitly that publishers can't use my translations to train AI, nor use AI-generated art for book cover or promotional purposes. this conversation is happening a lot among writers but it's good for translators to adopt as well.
one of the model contracts for translators created by a writer's union now has language addressing AI but i haven't seen it in the other model contracts so this is a reminder, for myself and also everyone else.
i want to raise this issue especially with translators given our field is especially susceptible to dealing with publishers/organizations acting as if our job can be done by AI or machine translation, even though that's such a misunderstanding of what translators do.
but also the people behind AI and machine translation need a huge dataset to even train these machines, and they need a lot of high quality translations between specific language pairs, which simply doesn't exist. this makes literary translators extra vulnerable to being targeted, in my opinion
also, while we're on the topic, i would urge all writers to consider having a clause about banning AI/machine translation for their own work too, if they're licensing translation rights. the horror stories i have seen over the years with the mishandling of translations.
Completely agree. I did this on my latest contract and will continue going forward. I tried to get the publisher to agree to not allowing AI narration too, but they already have a deal for audiobooks so couldn’t accommodate that one - but they were supportive.
Yeah that's a good point. I have that in one of my contracts too. Most of my current projects involve me keeping the audio rights, but if that comes up I'll definitely need to keep an eye out. I have also had bad experiences in the past with non-Mandarin speakers narrating my original writing and
So annoying! I have been sent lists of words/names and asked to make an audio file of the correct pronunciations before now. In trade fiction I don’t usually have any say over the audio rights, although I sometimes (not always) get a royalty.
one of the rules i have learned from being a writer negotiating contracts especially in sff spaces is to be super specific in getting publishers to list all the rights they actually will need and use. for poetry, often they don't end up really needing audio rights so i just keep them.
I agree, but with translations, if they already have audio rights to the underlying work, they want it for the translation too. I try not to give up any rights they don’t already have in the underlying work.
