Posts - Clément Martin

“What about AI?”

Luddites breaking a Jacquard loom, Penny Magazine, 1844.

This is the question I always get when I say I’m a translator. Sometimes, those asking are implying “Is it good? Do you use it?”; at other times, it rather means “Unemployed already?” But it’s a legitimate question! I’m quite a technophile (I mean, I’ve had a custom keyboard made!); why, as a translator, shouldn’t I use yet another translation tool?

For many reasons (and because I have the option not to; not everybody can, I’ll come back to it). Before I list them, I need to make something clear: I say “AI” (=artificial intelligence) because it’s the word used most frequently these days to designate the large language models (generative artificial intelligence tools, the most famous of which is OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and, to a lesser extent, neural machine translation (like DeepL). These are the “tools” I oppose. I have nothing against AI when it decodes the human genome, when it detects upcoming natural disasters, or when it makes me think I’m very clever in video games. I’m no technophobe, and I have a precise target in mind when I talk about AI.

This point being settled, here’s why I’m against AI in translation.

Free tools

Praise the Sun!

A few weeks back, I told you about social networks and how I wanted to get rid of them so that my self-promotion wouldn’t rely on the whims of a few company heads. In the same spirit of, say, de-google-ification writ large, I thought I would try to extend this idea to the rest of the tools I use everyday. In this short post, I’ll take stock and look at what I used before, and what I use now.

Network(s)

Maybe this is what we all need to do.

As a freelancer at the beginning of their career, you always sort of have to do self-promotion, to make sure you’re visible, etc. Social networks seem to be a good tool for that. For instance, among all the scribblers and ink slingers I am now a part of, a microblogging network such as X (formerly Twitter) has long felt unavoidable. But as every other tool, it is not neutral, and its recent evolution is extremely alarming.

Indeed, early this week, on January 20, the inauguration of Donald Trump happened, and the 47th President of the United States brought to the government far-right billionaire Elon Musk (who supports the AfD in Germany and does nazi salutes to “throw his heart to the crowd”). That’s why the HelloQuitX initiative, launched by members of the CNRS, has picked this very day to incite everyone to leave X, which Musk acquired in 2022. Now he’s part of the United States government, the billionaire answers even less to their justice department, and can freely manipulate the network’s algorithm to suit his sordid political ends. Indeed, under the guise of “freedom of speech”, X has been flooded by extreme speech and fake accounts that make it more or less unusable. Besides, for some people, remaining on X also means refusing to oppose Musk’s fascist turn. That is the reason why many famous media outlets decided to quit it.

Quitting X, then. Why not? But to go where?

2024 Recap

My third year as a translator is (already!) coming to an end, and it was rife with interesting projects and promising prospects. In no particular order:

Night of the Hogmen

Today, I’d like to say a few words about a translation I’m quite proud of, because it’s my small contribution to the bountiful world of indie role-playing games (RPGs). But before telling you all about it, a quick word about context.

If you’re roughly my age (almost forty, God how time flies), you probably remember a time when this hobby was reviled and the object of media scares that were as justified as they were rational (i.e. not at all). But today, geek culture has become cool (and is a huge market) and thus playing role-playing games, which you could describe as telling more or less structured collaborative stories around a table (or over the internet), is no longer taboo. Spearheading this new-found popularity is a household name owned by financial mammoth Hasbro, Dungeons & Dragons, which has become synonymous with role-playing games for many (thanks to that Stranger Things episode amongst other things).

Stranger Things, season 1, episode 1. Aren’t nerds cool?

Quasi-mute news

While you wait for juicier posts, I tell you as much as I can on about what I’ve been up to for the past months:

I’ve translated my first comic book! Book 3 of Jordan Mechner and Mario Alberti’s Monte Cristo trilogy. It was very interesting to work on it because of the visual context and space constraints it entails, both of which reminded me of my daily video games localization jobs.
I’ve become the secretary of the ATLF (Association of French Literary Translators), in which I do my best to try and better our collective working conditions. And I work with amazing people!
I’ve finished my second novel translation, but I can’t talk about it.
I’m working on my third novel translation, but I can’t talk about it.
I’ve translated or contributed to the translation of several video game projects, but I can’t talk about it.

At this point, I might as well be a spy.

But I’ll tell you more about it all very soon! (For real this time.)

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age

As a translator, I will usually say that I see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist. And if something defines a good craftsman, it’s using the right tools. But what are the tools of the translator? Let’s think:

Word-processing software
Dictionaries (monolingual, bilingual, technical, synonyms, slang, swear words, onomatopoeia… ALL the dictionaries)
Spellchecking software
Reference books (glossaries, manuals, etc.)
An online encyclopedia
CAT tools?
~~Generative artificial intelligence~~ (Why not? Read this.)

I already have all this and use it regularly. Is that everything, though? No! I’m forgetting the most fundamental of them all, and eagle-eyed readers who appreciate my subtle talent for image editing have already guessed what it is: the keyboard. (Because I’m indeed not translating with a pen, finding it dangerously deprived of any backup function.)

The keyboard, then. But not just any keyboard.

James Grady – Le dernier grand train d’Amérique

I could’ve written a sober post announcing that the book is out. This is not that article.

Here it is, at last! The first novel I’ve ever translated is released today. Which means you’ll be able to go to a real bookshop, to open a real book and to find my very own name on both the title page AND the back cover — and potentially buy it with real money, but that is up to you. It might not mean much to you, but I can’t stop being amazed at this having become my job. Almost two years ago to the day, Rivages Noir asked me to try my hand at translating this book I had read for them, and today… it actually exists, and has the beautiful cover you can see above.

New year and not so vain wishes

Choo chooing into 2024

I feel like I have begun all the posts on this blog by apologising for not writing more. So here’s my sole new year blog resolution (which is dual, see how I’m already trying to wriggle out of it). This year, I want to:

Stop apologising for not writing more.
Write more.

That should work.

But to the matter at hand. Speaking of writing, and publishing, I can finally announce the upcoming release of my first translation: Le dernier grand train d’Amérique, by James Grady (originally published in 2022 with a very sober title: This Train).

AdventureX!

Prospection isn’t always the most gratifying part of my job as an independent translator. But sometimes, it can be incredibly exciting. It was the case when I visited a narrative game conference which took place in London on November 4-5: AdventureX.

AdventureX is an event organized by passionate people, for passionate people. Since 2011, they have gathered each year the big names in game narrative, for talks on a variety of topics. For instance, those I attended this year were about, amongst other things, the use of history as a source of inspiration (Sagar Beroshi), the representation of medical conditions in video games (Marina Sciberras), or “making games for real”, that is how to infuse games with reality without doing so artificially (Chella Ramanan). I went out of every talk with way too many notes, and a new perspective on things.