AI is only so so at translation. I'd only recommend doing this if you are familiar with the language yourself so that you can proof read it, or if you plan on paying someone familiar with the language to proof read your manuscript. Editing is an essential step in any professional writing project, and it's especially important with AI writing.
@@reedriter2 For the OCR portion, AI is great. For the translation portion, no, absolutely not. Any historian would roll over in their grave at the thought of someone doing such a thing. As authors it is our responsibility, not just to our brand, but to humanity, to care enough to try to make our text as accurate as possible when working with non-fiction. If you aren't passionate about the project, then you have no business writing it IMO. Ask yourself how happy you would be to buy something like a recipe book where 20% of the recipes are wrong. Would you be happy with that? No, you'd be furious. You'd give that book 1 star and you'd tell all your friends how horrible it was, so they didn't buy it. This is no different.
@@BruceWayne15325 I agree, In my case, I know the language I am translating to, and the AI is a great draft to start with. but I find a lot of mistakes. Especially if the book non fiction
This is a fantastic idea and a great video! Could you consider creating a step-by-step tutorial that takes us through the entire process of publishing a public domain book? This would be especially helpful for those of us new to publishing. It could cover everything from getting started, choosing publishing platforms like Amazon, designing a cover, and using tools such as Atticus, or other helpful resources.
This is one of the most fun and exciting projects I've heard of lately! I've done a little translation, so I'm shocked I didn't think of it! I know just what I want to translate, but I'd like to walk the translation from direct transliteration to easy-to-understand modern translation, totally about four stages... Oh this is going to be *fun*! :D
Ok, so where do I buy your modernised translated books, Jason? I watched on kdp and so nothing of sorts trough all your catalogue. What title should I search for? You gave no links to check in your video description. Please I would like to check this.
Thanks for the video, it is exactly what I have been trying to do. What I have contrived by a tedious process to paste into Claude did translate from old English very well. However Claude says it says it is text chat only and does not accept images. So Is that function with the paid subscription? Or is there a trick I am not seeing?
Hi Jason! I'm curious to know what you'll get in English because, even for a French person like me, it's very difficult to read. It's very, very old French. Probably medieval French. I think you'd need a specialist in paelo-french (if that word exists) to understand what it means. And I'm not sure that claude's training corpus contains much late medieval French.
I've got mixed feelings about this in terms of the societal benefit. Simplifying an English text you can generally understand is useful to a point, though I would hope most people will still go to the source and use these translations if they can't make sense of something in the original text. Sometimes it's the writing style that makes something compelling and I'm not sure how many people would be interested in Shakespeare purely based on the strength of his narratives without the prose so at some point you're doing the work a disservice if that's the readers only point of entry. Translating from another language is more problematic because not only are you not preserving the prose, you have no idea if you're preserving the meaning. You can check to make sure that you're not outputting nonsense but you don't have any way to ensure the subtext and nuance are captured the same way you can make sure something from Elizabethan English is still conveying the same idea. It works fine in this specific case where it can be checked against a human-translation but it seems like there's a narrow market for undercutting existing human translations. It's also probably not a societal benefit outside of cases like this where the existing translation is prohibitively expensive in which case, I feel like people should explore alternatives for acquiring that content rather than buying an inferior machine translation. I guess if there is just no existing translation, it's better to do something like this where you can provide the work in a digestible form rather than the reader just putting it into Google Translate so I can see valid use cases but I can also see well-meaning people producing translations that end up pushing existing translations from fluent or native speakers out of the market or confusing the market. I suppose there are ways of curating that material so that people who just want human translations can still get them and hopefully we'll eventually get to a point where AI translations are on the same level as a professional native translation.
I agree. Even modern literature, show don't tell, can give a sentence multiple meanings or interpretations. The choice of every word matters. Make it clear AI was used in the process, and let the customer decide if it's worth the price.
Okay, maybe its a stupid question, but where do you upload and sell those? You didnt mention that. On what marketplace or whatever did you show us your earnings? (I am new here)
When you publish these books, do you credit the original author or list your own name as the author? Also, are these works released into the public domain, or are they published under a different copyright status?
I credit the original author, though I might credit myself as an editor or translator or what have you. And while the work still remains in the public domain (and I select public domain when uploading to Amazon), technically that specific version of the public domain book (and any original additions you added to the public domain book), can still be copyrighted.
@@TheNerdyNovelist Thank you! I've been following you for a while now, and you've been such an inspiration. Your guidance has motivated me to start writing!
Le corpus de textes dans ce type de vieux français est bien trop mince pour que je confie la traduction à une IA américaine. Alors même que je suis français, ça me parait hautement approximatif et sans aucun moyen de contrôle (j'ai du mal à le lire). Si la version française se vend alors que c'est dans le domaine public, bravo ! Ce serait quand même étonnant 😄
Poetry is not about comprehension. It's about feeling, how it makes you feel. Poetry speaks to the heart, not to the mind. Otherwise great video. That's why it's very difficult to translate poetry.
@@troyphillips6820it can happen. If you are sure it is in the public domain you tell that to claude or chatgpt and it will acknowledge it and start translating. I tried, it works.
What I am MOST interested in, is using PD as FODDER to start a new story. There are so many PD Books out there. How best to rewrite them into a NEW STORY. Is it as simple as just asking ChatGPT to rewrite the story and then map it out?
Any idea how you might take public domain art from a book and use AI to enhance it? I'm a fan of John R. Neill's art in the Oz books, and some of his lineart is a little dense, and sometimes hard to tell what you're looking at. I wouldn't mind being able to capture the style and essence of it while making it just a little bit better (and possibly in color)
@@TheNerdyNovelist I'll give that a shot, thanks. Edit: I went to go give it a try, and they don't have a free option. Thanks anyway. I'll see what it does with Krue and Leonardo.
I have a question about claude ai - What can you do when it tells you that you are out of messages and need to start a new conversation? I am using it to help me write a novel, and I have the pro plan. If I start a new chat, it won't know any of the content I have previously written. Help?
It's only work if you context of words you are translating let's take an example you are translating Chinese naruto fanfiction but you will find out that it doesn't translate genders of character correctly in sentences. it will pronounce MC as he or she and some words will have to make it readable like for example we have scene where hero find his wife was pregnant but Chinese translation will like " lu chen just find out her precious jade was growing xi wu belly" stuff like that so there no easy money
@@Justise it's not the fault of ai but languages it self like in some languages have unisex words used for both man and woman so that's why ai sturgle to translate that type of lanuges
now if I could maybe do a restyle that might work for me like i could download a version of Robin Hood from Project Gutenberg and rewrite it in modern (the difference is how many steps it already in English and already text
My question is, do we publish it to Amazon as public domain? Or not because it counts as a translation? The authorship is what always gets rejected when I tried it before
@@TheNerdyNovelist Ah, gotcha. I must have missed that part. Sorry. Very helpful video as are all of your videos. Your channel is one of my faves. Your tips and material are actually legit and useful among a sea of clickbait content that provide little substance and/or are deceptive or blatantly dishonest. Thank you!
Yes that's the question I had. I found something on Google which said that translations have their own copyright. So if you find a story that's already translated, is that out of bounds? I'm very confused now.
@@GrahamSouthornYou can make your own translation but you can‘t lean on the existing translation. And you have to be careful with „public domain“ because sth that is public domain according to US law could still be cooyrighted in a European country etc
Shhhh... don't give this away, i do.. well, I guess now, did this... oh... too late... there were hundreds of thousands of $$$ you could have made by just doing this, from many different languages. Alien Beach Romance will surely make money! Are you telling Amazon (KDP) this book was almost 100% AI?
Please verify your French translation with actual French speakers rather than trying to publish a raw AI translation. Claude's French is about on par with a non-native speaker who has a couple years of high school French
Well in his case he’s translating from French to English rather than the other way around so he can check himself that the text makes sense…and he also already has an English translation of the book so he can also check the two against each other if he needs to. 🤷♀️
Public domain works are not under copyright. Anyone can use them, rewrite them, publish them, etc. provided the ORIGINAL is used, and not someone else's adaptation (or translation) of it. For example, the original Little Mermaid story is public domain, but Disney's version of it is not.
Almost everywhere in the world, before 1925, and some places/countries, even 1970 or so... works are public domain. Disney is THE BIGGEST public domain hoarder... and they do damn try to copyright public domain works.
AI is only so so at translation. I'd only recommend doing this if you are familiar with the language yourself so that you can proof read it, or if you plan on paying someone familiar with the language to proof read your manuscript. Editing is an essential step in any professional writing project, and it's especially important with AI writing.
So so is actually good enough for this particular use case.
@@reedriter2 For the OCR portion, AI is great. For the translation portion, no, absolutely not. Any historian would roll over in their grave at the thought of someone doing such a thing. As authors it is our responsibility, not just to our brand, but to humanity, to care enough to try to make our text as accurate as possible when working with non-fiction. If you aren't passionate about the project, then you have no business writing it IMO.
Ask yourself how happy you would be to buy something like a recipe book where 20% of the recipes are wrong. Would you be happy with that? No, you'd be furious. You'd give that book 1 star and you'd tell all your friends how horrible it was, so they didn't buy it. This is no different.
@@BruceWayne15325 I agree, In my case, I know the language I am translating to, and the AI is a great draft to start with. but I find a lot of mistakes. Especially if the book non fiction
@@user-hh2is9kg9j yeah this is a great workflow as long as there is fact checking
This is awesome. It also helps preserve knowledge
We've done this personally for sources we receive in foreign languages
This is a fantastic idea and a great video! Could you consider creating a step-by-step tutorial that takes us through the entire process of publishing a public domain book? This would be especially helpful for those of us new to publishing. It could cover everything from getting started, choosing publishing platforms like Amazon, designing a cover, and using tools such as Atticus, or other helpful resources.
Seconded. The crazy characters that come through from the page numbers/ original footnotes just turn what I get in Vellum into a mess.
This is one of the most fun and exciting projects I've heard of lately! I've done a little translation, so I'm shocked I didn't think of it! I know just what I want to translate, but I'd like to walk the translation from direct transliteration to easy-to-understand modern translation, totally about four stages... Oh this is going to be *fun*! :D
Just a sidenote, Jason. Cajun French is an old version of 17th century French.
Great video! Please create a followup video with more specific detail about your process. Love your channel!
Really insightful, mate! Thanks for sharing... You are one of my most favorite Podcaster...
Love your prompts! This looks amazing and is an inspiration!
Glad to hear it!
Wow ty for putting this out there.
Ok, so where do I buy your modernised translated books, Jason? I watched on kdp and so nothing of sorts trough all your catalogue. What title should I search for? You gave no links to check in your video description. Please I would like to check this.
They don’t show up under my name.
Great video. Thanks for sharing.
Where do you publish your books? Any good tutorials available?
Can you also talk about the keywords you used? I mean did you use the author’s name in KDP keywords?
Thanks for the video, it is exactly what I have been trying to do. What I have contrived by a tedious process to paste into Claude did translate from old English very well. However Claude says it says it is text chat only and does not accept images. So Is that function with the paid subscription? Or is there a trick I am not seeing?
How delightful! And what a good idea! 👏👏👏
Hi Jason! I'm curious to know what you'll get in English because, even for a French person like me, it's very difficult to read. It's very, very old French. Probably medieval French. I think you'd need a specialist in paelo-french (if that word exists) to understand what it means. And I'm not sure that claude's training corpus contains much late medieval French.
I've got mixed feelings about this in terms of the societal benefit. Simplifying an English text you can generally understand is useful to a point, though I would hope most people will still go to the source and use these translations if they can't make sense of something in the original text. Sometimes it's the writing style that makes something compelling and I'm not sure how many people would be interested in Shakespeare purely based on the strength of his narratives without the prose so at some point you're doing the work a disservice if that's the readers only point of entry.
Translating from another language is more problematic because not only are you not preserving the prose, you have no idea if you're preserving the meaning. You can check to make sure that you're not outputting nonsense but you don't have any way to ensure the subtext and nuance are captured the same way you can make sure something from Elizabethan English is still conveying the same idea. It works fine in this specific case where it can be checked against a human-translation but it seems like there's a narrow market for undercutting existing human translations. It's also probably not a societal benefit outside of cases like this where the existing translation is prohibitively expensive in which case, I feel like people should explore alternatives for acquiring that content rather than buying an inferior machine translation.
I guess if there is just no existing translation, it's better to do something like this where you can provide the work in a digestible form rather than the reader just putting it into Google Translate so I can see valid use cases but I can also see well-meaning people producing translations that end up pushing existing translations from fluent or native speakers out of the market or confusing the market. I suppose there are ways of curating that material so that people who just want human translations can still get them and hopefully we'll eventually get to a point where AI translations are on the same level as a professional native translation.
I agree. Even modern literature, show don't tell, can give a sentence multiple meanings or interpretations. The choice of every word matters.
Make it clear AI was used in the process, and let the customer decide if it's worth the price.
Okay, maybe its a stupid question, but where do you upload and sell those? You didnt mention that. On what marketplace or whatever did you show us your earnings? (I am new here)
I was going to ask the same thing, how do you make money out of public domain documents?
KDP on Amazon, I believe..
Amazon KDP
@@TheNerdyNovelist thx
This is a very cool idea. Do you have a recommended resource on finding original books in public domain?
When you publish these books, do you credit the original author or list your own name as the author? Also, are these works released into the public domain, or are they published under a different copyright status?
I credit the original author, though I might credit myself as an editor or translator or what have you. And while the work still remains in the public domain (and I select public domain when uploading to Amazon), technically that specific version of the public domain book (and any original additions you added to the public domain book), can still be copyrighted.
@@TheNerdyNovelist Thank you! I've been following you for a while now, and you've been such an inspiration. Your guidance has motivated me to start writing!
Le corpus de textes dans ce type de vieux français est bien trop mince pour que je confie la traduction à une IA américaine. Alors même que je suis français, ça me parait hautement approximatif et sans aucun moyen de contrôle (j'ai du mal à le lire). Si la version française se vend alors que c'est dans le domaine public, bravo ! Ce serait quand même étonnant 😄
Great idea.
Great video, Jason. Very informative! My head is spinning with ideas already! 🙂
Can you let us know how/where repurposed public domain literature can be marketed?
Poetry is not about comprehension. It's about feeling, how it makes you feel. Poetry speaks to the heart, not to the mind. Otherwise great video. That's why it's very difficult to translate poetry.
Where do you get your public domain texts from? Google Books? Gutenberg Project?
Usually Gutenberg or Archive.org
@@TheNerdyNovelist When I downloaded a Kipling novel and tried to have Claude transcribe it. Claude refused because of copyright issues
@@troyphillips6820it can happen. If you are sure it is in the public domain you tell that to claude or chatgpt and it will acknowledge it and start translating. I tried, it works.
What I am MOST interested in, is using PD as FODDER to start a new story. There are so many PD Books out there. How best to rewrite them into a NEW STORY. Is it as simple as just asking ChatGPT to rewrite the story and then map it out?
Any idea how you might take public domain art from a book and use AI to enhance it? I'm a fan of John R. Neill's art in the Oz books, and some of his lineart is a little dense, and sometimes hard to tell what you're looking at. I wouldn't mind being able to capture the style and essence of it while making it just a little bit better (and possibly in color)
You should give it a shot! Try uploading an image of it and giving mid journey some prompts!
Yes I would try using Magnific.ai
@@TheNerdyNovelist I'll give that a shot, thanks.
Edit: I went to go give it a try, and they don't have a free option. Thanks anyway. I'll see what it does with Krue and Leonardo.
@@Ank3rman Haven't been too impressed with midjourney, but I'm willing to try. Thanks.
Good stuff thanks for sharing Jason! Welcome back from your adventures
Thank you for this video my dude.
Nice!
Do you have a course on creating short stories using Ai pls?
I have a question about claude ai - What can you do when it tells you that you are out of messages and need to start a new conversation? I am using it to help me write a novel, and I have the pro plan. If I start a new chat, it won't know any of the content I have previously written. Help?
I am trying to translate text, but seems to stop after about 400 to 600 words. I am using Claude Sonnet 3.5
Cool project!
It's only work if you context of words you are translating let's take an example you are translating Chinese naruto fanfiction but you will find out that it doesn't translate genders of character correctly in sentences. it will pronounce MC as he or she and some words will have to make it readable like for example we have scene where hero find his wife was pregnant but Chinese translation will like " lu chen just find out her precious jade was growing xi wu belly" stuff like that so there no easy money
Weird flex to have bad English post that is difficult to read because of either bad translation or bad writing, to talk about how bad translating is.
@@Justise it's not the fault of ai but languages it self like in some languages have unisex words used for both man and woman so that's why ai sturgle to translate that type of lanuges
Excellent.. I have wanted to know how best to use PD with AI..
The Translate and Make It Modern prompts in the Prompt Library seem to be jibberish. Is there something I'm missing?
Oh, and do you publish your public domain books under a different account from your main account for your own books?
I like the idea but I don't have the executive function to do it I use ai for accessibility as i have ADHD and autism with dysgraphia and dyscalculia
now if I could maybe do a restyle that might work for me like i could download a version of Robin Hood from Project Gutenberg and rewrite it in modern (the difference is how many steps it already in English and already text
My question is, do we publish it to Amazon as public domain? Or not because it counts as a translation? The authorship is what always gets rejected when I tried it before
Love you stuff TNN. My question is, marketing. How do you market your books so people will find them? Just putting them on Amazon is not enough.
What about the legality of this? That is my concern.
It’s public domain so you can do whatever you want with it.
@@TheNerdyNovelist Ah, gotcha. I must have missed that part. Sorry.
Very helpful video as are all of your videos. Your channel is one of my faves. Your tips and material are actually legit and useful among a sea of clickbait content that provide little substance and/or are deceptive or blatantly dishonest. Thank you!
Can you do a video explaining all of the do's and don't's as far as what is and what's not allowed when publishing public domain works?
Yes that's the question I had. I found something on Google which said that translations have their own copyright. So if you find a story that's already translated, is that out of bounds? I'm very confused now.
@@GrahamSouthornYou can make your own translation but you can‘t lean on the existing translation. And you have to be careful with „public domain“ because sth that is public domain according to US law could still be cooyrighted in a European country etc
@@NinaKatharinaWeber thanks!
I KNEW there was a reason I hadn't OCRed that book yet; oh, yeah P-R-O-C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-O-N.
Shhhh... don't give this away, i do.. well, I guess now, did this... oh... too late... there were hundreds of thousands of $$$ you could have made by just doing this, from many different languages.
Alien Beach Romance will surely make money!
Are you telling Amazon (KDP) this book was almost 100% AI?
Please verify your French translation with actual French speakers rather than trying to publish a raw AI translation. Claude's French is about on par with a non-native speaker who has a couple years of high school French
Well in his case he’s translating from French to English rather than the other way around so he can check himself that the text makes sense…and he also already has an English translation of the book so he can also check the two against each other if he needs to. 🤷♀️
Exactly.
@@makennazornes He also mentioned publishing the French text.
As in publishing the original public domain French version, no AI involved with that @@GenderPunkJezebelle999
@GenderPunkJezebelle999 but it is not translated. He published the French version as is with no translation. All he did was turn a pdf into a book.
Can you explain how this method doesn't violate copyright laws? It is a cool idea however
Public domain works are not under copyright. Anyone can use them, rewrite them, publish them, etc. provided the ORIGINAL is used, and not someone else's adaptation (or translation) of it. For example, the original Little Mermaid story is public domain, but Disney's version of it is not.
@@steveking4878 Thank you!
@@steveking4878 so we can also take 1001 nights aladin also but can't take Disney one
Almost everywhere in the world, before 1925, and some places/countries, even 1970 or so... works are public domain.
Disney is THE BIGGEST public domain hoarder... and they do damn try to copyright public domain works.
£33 Billion for Immigrants ~ 1.8 Billion Winter Fuel Payments