I’m glad to finally share my new piece of reporting for Anime News Network, Does the Light Novel Translation Process Need AI?. This is one of the longer features I mentioned I had in the works in last month’s blog post.

It really says something about the AI debate that I began working on this article back in May. This topic is just as relevant as it was six months ago.

This is the central idea of the story:

One of the biggest buzzwords in light novel translation today is Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE). With MTPE, a machine translation tool generates a raw translation, which is then smoothed and localized by a human translator. As an insider at a major light novel publisher told Anime News Network, “Of course, we’re looking into MTPE, everyone is.” But is that true? More importantly, do AI translation tools really work?

I centered this article around just one light novel series, The Ascendance of a Bookworm, both because it’s a very good series and because the pieces fell perfectly into place. I spoke to the novel’s publisher, Sam Pinanski and Andrew Schubauer of J-Novel Club; its official translator, Quof; and Tristan “Arkada” Gallant, a Youtuber fan who read the novel both in AI translation and in the form of its official release. I also spoke to industry professional Katrina Leonoudakis who was not only a valuable source but an essential aid in my reporting process.

Going into this story, I expected that fans would support MTPE (the better to get light novels more quickly) while translators would be opposed to it. I was surprised when the biggest proponent in the story was Quof, the official translator.

A cursory glance at my Bluesky account will tell you where I personally stand on the issue, because I’ve liked and RT’d a lot of anti-AI sentiments. Like I’ve been saying since 2011 when I wrote the Otaku Journalist Manifesto, I think it’s important to acknowledge my biases directly in order to produce authentic journalism. I don’t think “objective reporting” ought to be a journalist’s highest aspiration. Instead, I used my own opinions on this topic to inspire my interview questions and fuel my curiosity about the story. The result is an article that allows readers to draw their own conclusions, or so I hope. You can let me know if I was successful.

Read it for yourself when you press the big ol’ button:

Read my article on ANN