Why choose me?

I remember the exact moment when I first tried feeding a passage from a historical romance novel into Google Translate, just out of curiosity. It was a scene where the protagonist was gazing at her beloved across a crowded ballroom, and the original English captured this exquisite tension between longing and propriety that makes the genre so compelling.

What came out in Italian was... technically correct. Every word had been dutifully converted. But the soul of the moment—the breathless anticipation, the cultural weight of a stolen glance in 19th-century society, the rhythm that made readers' hearts skip—had vanished completely.

That was five years ago. Today, that same passage would probably come out much better. AI has learned to be more sophisticated, more nuanced. But as I've spent the last nine years of my career breathing life into stories, moving them from one language and culture to another, I've realized something fundamental: literary translation isn't really about translating words at all.

What AI Gets Wrong About Stories

I've experimented extensively with AI translation over the past few years, not out of fear, but out of professional curiosity. 

Here's what I've discovered: AI treats literary text like a puzzle to be solved rather than a symphony to be performed.

The text often lacks emotional nuance. In one novel I translated, the author crafted sentences to mirror the heroine's emotional state—using short, choppy sentences for shock and longer ones for acceptance. The AI, however, produced grammatically correct Italian that lost this emotional depth.

AI also struggles with cultural context. In a contemporary romance, family expectations were crucial to the plot. What seemed charming in English needed careful adjustment in Italian to avoid sounding oppressive. The AI's direct translations risked altering readers' sympathies.

Furthermore, AI fails to capture an author's unique voice. Every writer has a distinct style in building tension and revealing character. Preserving this voice in translation is essential, requiring an understanding of not just the content but the chosen expression and its significance to the story.

The Craft I've Learned to Love

Over nine years, I've developed what I can only describe as a translator's intuition. It's the ability to feel when a sentence is working versus when it's merely correct. It's knowing when to preserve an author's unusual word choice because it serves the story, and when to adapt it because Italian readers would stumble over a literal translation.

When I'm working on a particularly challenging passage, I often find myself acting out scenes, trying to understand the emotional truth of a moment before I even think about words. How would this character move? What would their voice sound like? What are they not saying that's as important as what they are saying?

This is the work that feeds my soul as a translator. And this is the work that no algorithm can do, because it's not really about language at all—it's about human understanding.

 

My Complicated Relationship with AI Tools

I'm not against technology. I use AI tools regularly in my workflow, and they've genuinely improved my efficiency in certain areas.

For first drafts of highly technical passages—medical procedures described in a historical setting, for instance—AI can give me a solid starting point. For consistency checking across a long series, it can help me maintain character voice patterns. For research, it can quickly pull up historical references or cultural contexts that might take me hours to find manually.

But here's the crucial distinction: I use AI as a research assistant, not as a translator.

I've tried various AI post-editing workflows, and what I've found is that fixing an AI translation of literary text often takes longer than translating from scratch. Why? Because bad translation isn't just about wrong words—it's about wrong rhythm, wrong emotional register, wrong cultural assumptions. When AI gets it wrong, it gets it wrong in ways that corrupt the entire foundation of a passage.

It's like trying to tune a piano that's not just out of key, but built with the wrong materials. Sometimes you need to start over.

 

What Clients Are Really Buying

I've had clients approach me asking whether they should just use AI for their literary projects. My response is always a question: "What are you trying to achieve?" If the goal is to publish a book that resonates with readers, fosters an emotional connection, and respects the original author's artistic vision, then we are discussing an entirely different level of service.

When someone hires me to translate a novel, they're not just buying linguistic conversion. They're buying cultural interpretation, artistic sensitivity, and the kind of deep textual understanding that can only come from years of living with literature across languages.

They're buying the knowledge I've gained from translating dozens of love scenes and understanding how intimacy is expressed differently across cultures. They're buying my experience with historical research and my understanding of how to make period language accessible without sacrificing authenticity. They're buying my ear for dialogue and my instinct for pacing.

Most importantly, they're buying my commitment to serving the story above all else—even when that means making translation choices that are more complex, more nuanced, and more time-consuming than the obvious alternatives.

 

A Personal Perspective

As I look toward the future of my career, I'm not defensive about my role—I'm excited about it.

Every day, I get to be a cultural ambassador, helping stories cross borders and find new audiences. I get to solve puzzles that require creativity, empathy, and a deep understanding of human nature. I get to preserve and transmit artistic vision across languages and cultures.

AI can process words. I translate worlds.

And in a time when authentic human connection across cultures feels more precious than ever, I believe the work I do is not just surviving the AI revolution—it's becoming more vital.

The machine can be my assistant, but it can never be my replacement. Because what I really do isn't translate text—I translate the human experience from one cultural context to another, preserving not just meaning, but magic.

That's work that will always require a human heart.