Michaelmas
Out of a fired ship, which by no way
But drowning could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came
Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown’d.
—John Donne, “A Burnt Ship”
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SteinerBooks Statement on "AI"-Translation
Michaelmas 2024
In the last two decades, advances in technology have greatly changed the art and the business of publishing, in many ways for the better. With the relatively recent unveiling of "large language models," the possibilities for machines to do, for humans, the core human work of reading, writing, and thinking has reached a significant threshold, through which we must pass, wakefully.
At SteinerBooks, we acknowledge the usefulness of many tools of technology that help us in accomplishing our core mission as a non-profit publisher, which is to make the words, thought, and deeds of Rudolf Steiner both better known and more deeply understood in the English-speaking world.
While we do also recognize the utility and convenience of AI-driven "automated translation" in a multitude of private circumstances, to present and publish such works as valid English-language translations for the reading public would be a dereliction of our duty as a publisher and mission as an organization.
SteinerBooks both publishes and seeks to represent a school of thought that recognizes and advocates for the centrality of human agency, and an increasing consciousness of the same.
Furthermore, having seen, experienced, and closely worked with the results of effortless automated machine-translation, we are convinced that the counter-effort required to humanize such translations, in the sense of literary integrity—if it is even possible—does not justify their undertaking, and so we are committed to only publishing works-in-translation that have been executed by living, breathing, spiritual human beings.
John-Scott Legg
Executive Director
