Nabokov

Who he is

Named for Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), who spent years putting Eugene Onegin into English and refused to make it pretty. He wanted the words, not a poem that rhymed, and critics hated the result.

The name is a reminder of the standard, not a claim to meet it. Nabokov thought translation was work for a scholar with a lifetime to spend on it.

The problem he is for

Most of these books will never be translated by a person. The Moon Pool has existed for a century without a Persian edition, and nothing suggests one is coming.

So the choice is not between a machine translation and a human one. It is between a machine translation and nothing.

How he works

A paragraph at a time, and only when somebody asks.

Nothing is translated in advance: a language appears the moment a reader chooses it. Each paragraph is translated on its own and put back exactly where it was, so the book keeps its shape — the same passages in the same order, whichever language you read it in.

Which also means you can move between them mid-book, and land on the same line.

What he will not touch

Poetry. A poem carries its meaning in how it sounds: in metre, in rhyme, in the word chosen because it was the shorter one. None of that survives the trip. Translating a poem is writing a new poem that stands in the same place, and that is authorship rather than conversion.

A generated poem would be the one thing this shelf cannot publish — a text that looks faithful and is not. So verse is refused outright, including a few lines of it inside a novel.

Saying which is which

Every page says where its words came from: the author's own, a translator's, or a machine's. You never have to guess, and you can always find the original.

The legal side is unusually clean. Machine-generated text carries no copyright, so nobody owns these translations — not us, not anyone. A human translation carries its own seventy years; this inherits no clock at all.