Chinese publishers see AI translation as the killer app for pushing web novels overseas

The art of translation has existed as long as literature. While artificial intelligence has so far proven to be inferior at the job compared to humans, that hasn’t deterred China’s online literature platforms from betting on algorithms to introduce Chinese web novels to English-speaking audiences. And they hope that computers can do it faster and cheaper.

While a professional human translator might take hours to translate 1,000 words, AI can do it in a single second, according to Funstory.ai, a three-year-old Chinese start-up that publishes AI-translated Chinese web novels overseas.

“At the fastest, we can translate, publish and globally distribute a web novel in 48 hours,” said Tony Brief, the CEO of Funstory.ai whose Chinese name is Tong Ye.

Online literature has seen explosive growth in China in recent years. More than half of China’s internet population, equivalent to some 455 million people, are reading books online, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. More than 17 million people are publishing novels on the internet. Popular works span urban romance, history, science fiction and fantasy.

Chinese companies are hoping that level of popularity can translate elsewhere. And there are signs of potential: some Chinese web literature already has a cult following outside China, particularly the wuxia and xianxia martial arts genres. In 2019, there were 31 million overseas readers of Chinese web novels, iResearch estimated.

Not all of these readers are consuming AI-translated copy, though. Some wuxia fans dedicate themselves to manually translating novels and putting them up on sites like Wuxiaworld. Many take pride in the quality of their work, something that they doubt algorithms can replicate soon.