1) Jeanna Smialek, “What French Romance Novels Could Tell Us About A.I. and Translation Jobs” (NY Times, Feb. 15, 2026; archived):
The European Union, with its 27 nations and two dozen official languages, is a center of the translation and interpretation industry. That is why, in Brussels and The Hague and Paris, a recent nugget of literary news has generated so much conversation.
Harlequin France — purveyor of titles like “Médecins et Célibataires” (“Doctors and Singles”) and “Passion Pour un Inconnu” (“Passion for a Stranger”) — recently confirmed that it would be running tests with Fluent Planet, a company that uses A.I. to make translation cheaper and faster. The move was met with both outrage and resignation within the industry. Translator groups called Harlequin’s decision to cut ties with some human translators “unacceptable.” Translators themselves posted about the “sad news.” […]
Harlequin France’s story is an example of how artificial intelligence is sweeping the translation field, rapidly improving machine translation, particularly for popular language pairs like English and French.
Reports of the death of human translation are exaggerated, as the piece goes on to say. But “outrage and resignation” about sums it up. Thanks, cuchuflete!
2) Kashmir Hill, “They Are in Love but Don’t Speak the Same Language” (NY Times, Feb. 14, 2026; archived):
For many spouses, smartphone use is a point of tension. But for David Duda and Hong Liang, a couple in New Haven, Conn., the technology is so essential that they own eight external battery packs. If their phones die, so does their ability to communicate.
Mr. Duda, 62, speaks English, and Ms. Liang, 57, speaks Mandarin. They rely on a free smartphone app from Microsoft, called Translator, to render a text translation of what they say — like movie subtitles but for daily life.
Though they have been married for three years, they walked down the street on a recent December afternoon with their arms linked like newlyweds. This was out of necessity as much as affection: One of them chatted and navigated while the other’s eyes were locked on the phone, reading translated remarks. […]
Communicating this way requires close attention. Mr. Duda and Ms. Liang can’t half-listen to each other or walk away while talking. There are no shouted conversations from the shower. When they want to really connect, they spend hours on the couch or lying in bed, going back and forth until they feel sure they understand what the other has said.
You will not be surprised to learn that Translator sometimes screws up:
For example, while describing how Mr. Duda greeted her at the airport, Ms. Liang said that she got Covid shortly after her arrival and felt so awful she thought she was dying.
But those were not the words I saw on the screen. The app’s translation had her saying that she got a “new crown” and thought she was going to die. Confused, I asked if she meant that his gesture of carrying the loving sign was so romantic she could die. […]
The app had translated the Chinese term for Covid-19 — novel corona — as “new crown.” Mr. Duda had stayed next to her throughout her illness, she said, and his attentiveness had deepened her feelings for him, which is why she had brought it up.
Still, it’s a happier story. Thanks, Bonnie! (I note with sadness the note about the story’s author: “Kashmir Hill writes about how technology changes how we live. She studied a foreign language in college, which only 6 percent of Americans now do.” Six percent!)
I dare say that a title like Médecins et Célibataires might just as well have been “written” by a LLM in the first place.
One could find out by seeing how many fingers the feisty-yet-vulnerable heroine has.
I knew of a couple who communicated like that. They divorced after a couple of years, but I think there were other factors.
“She studied a foreign language in college, which only 6 percent of Americans now do”
I’m curious what the denominator is there. Is it 6% of all American who attend college, or 6% of all Americans altogether? Only something like 40% of Americans over 25 have a bachelors, which does help make the 6% number a little less horrifying.
Good point. I’ll pretend it’s the latter, which will make me feel better.
She studied a foreign language in college, which only 6 percent of Americans now do.” Six percent!)
That made me wonder if a fundamental part of my undergraduate experience was still going strong after nearly 60 years.
It is. Students are still required to demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English. If they can do this prior to enrollment they must learn a third language or study an upper level course in L2.
That this sort of requirement isn’t more widespread is troubling.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/reg/registration/language_requirement_2026.html#PolicySummary
@DE: Médecins et Célibataires is the title of a series. I imagine readers get exactly what they expect. And whether any of the characters are polydactylous… I prefer not to speculate.
6% is how many undergraduate students are enrolled in a non-English language course in a Fall semester. Almost all of them are “elementary” one-semester courses. Let’s say one-semester course is offered only in the Fall and there is a possibility of continuation in the Spring, but only a minority of students do continue. If typical American undergrad is 4 years, then it’s about 25% of all students with some “foreign” language.
If you think one semester for an L2 language is a ridiculous amount of time, we are in agreement. But as an LLM produced heroine of Médecins et Célibataires might have said c’est la vie.
Seems like a deliberate pun on the Médecins sans Frontières.
(“Doctors and Singles”) tempts one to question, in a U.S. context, why it isn’t at least ‘doctors and C-notes’ if not even larger denominations.
For non AE (American English) speakers, a single in colloquial speech is a one dollar bill. The joys of machine translation…
Médecins sans Frontières
French for “Doctors with no filter.” Bloody general surgeons, no notion of basic tact, the bastards.
In Taiwan, the term for Covid-19 translates as “Wuhan sick”. Only officialdom pussyfoots around being non-commital as to where it escaped from.
Ms Liang now lives in the US, is married to a monolingual American and hasn’t learned more than 200 words of basic English? At this point I am starting to have renewed respect for people who manage not to learn English, from the European perspective English feels like a slow moving ice sheet gradually crushing everything as it moves across the planet.
Purple romance (and similar pulp fiction) looks exactly like one of the places where AI translation can’t do much damage to the literary value of the underlying texts. The originals are so formulaic that they will soon be written by AI as well. More fingers to rip bodices, sling guns, and do surgery while romancing the pretty nurse.
Pretty neurosurgeon (also expert in 5 self-defence disciplines). The nurse is non-binary. The hero is a musician who helps the heroine to reconnect with her feelings while recovering from injuries caused by the heroine’s mistaken employment of self-defence discipline #4. Note to self: do not approach deadly neurosurgeon in deserted carpark at night.
I remember reading, in a 1980s anthology of failures, a brief Western purportedly written by computer in the 1970s. (“Tex reached tor his girl, but before he could get it out of his car the kid fired, hitting Tex in the elephant and the tundra.” etc) Fact-checking reveals the program did not purport to write narrative fiction, but merely Madlibs; in which context its output is hardly a failure.
Polydactyly is not only just a feature of AI. There is a 1993 book, ‘Castles in the Air’, where the heroine portrayed on the cover has more than the usual number of fingers, because she has more than the usual number of arms, ie three. The author, Christina Dodd, lightheartedly discusses the cover at https://www.christinadodd.com/christina-dodd-and-the-infamous-three-armed-cover/.
at this point I am starting to have renewed respect for people who manage not to learn English
In the 1970’s, I used to live upstairs from a Hungarian who had left in 1956, and who didn’t even know basic greetings in English.
He had a kind of support network of glamorous Hungarian emigré(e)s going on, which no doubt made his survival possible even so.
(He and I communicated by playing Nine Men’s Morris, at which he always won. After all, Hungarian.)
Your experience in this regard is very different from mine. In about 1964 I met a young woman at a party in Oxford who had left Hungary in 1956. She said that she started learning English in that year, but there was no way in a million years one would have guessed that. Her way of speaking had 100% of the character of an educated young woman who had lived her entire life in classy environments in England (educated at Benenden, or maybe Roedean, I think). There was absolutely nothing about her way of speaking to suggest otherwise. She was a very attractive young woman, and for the whole period of the party she was surrounded by young men (including your humble servant). No one could believe she wasn’t English. After all these years I remember her name, but I won’t mention it here, beyond saying that like a high proportion of Hungarian women I have met she was called Judy.