AI translation

[CatPerson]

Hi everyone,


I’m looking for some advice from other authors here because I’ve run into a situation I’m not quite sure how to solve. I’ve been a published author on Literotica in the past and previously released a 10-chapter story on the site. English is not my native language, although I can read and write it at a fairly high level. Because of that, my usual workflow is to write my stories first in Spanish (my native language) and then translate them into English.

For translation I use software tools, which I understand today often involve some form of AI. However, the stories themselves are completely written by me. The translator is only used to convert the text from Spanish into English. Recently, my last three submissions have been rejected for AI use. I’ve tried to address this as carefully as possible. After translating, I read the entire English version myself, make edits, and sometimes even have proofreaders or editors review it to make sure the translation didn’t introduce anything that wasn’t in the original text.

Despite this, I keep getting the same result. I’ve been advised to publish the stories in Spanish under the Non-English category. The problem is that this section appears to receive very little traffic, and realistically the stories would likely never be read there. My goal is simply to share my work with the wider community.

So I’m finding myself in a bit of a gray area:
I’m not using AI to write my stories, only to translate them, but the end result still seems to trigger the AI detection policies.

Has anyone else here dealt with something similar?
Are there translation workflows or tools that the site tends to accept?
Or is there some other way to demonstrate that the work is original?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions from other authors who may have navigated this before.

Thanks!

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

Hi everyone,


I’m looking for some advice from other authors here because I’ve run into a situation I’m not quite sure how to solve.


I’ve been a published author on Literotica in the past and previously released a 10-chapter story on the site. English is not my native language, although I can read and write it at a fairly high level. Because of that, my usual workflow is to write my stories first in Spanish (my native language) and then translate them into English.


For translation I use software tools, which I understand today often involve some form of AI. However, the stories themselves are completely written by me. The translator is only used to convert the text from Spanish into English.


Recently, my last three submissions have been rejected for AI use. I’ve tried to address this as carefully as possible. After translating, I read the entire English version myself, make edits, and sometimes even have proofreaders or editors review it to make sure the translation didn’t introduce anything that wasn’t in the original text.


Despite this, I keep getting the same result.


I’ve been advised to publish the stories in Spanish under the Non-English category. The problem is that this section appears to receive very little traffic, and realistically the stories would likely never be read there. My goal is simply to share my work with the wider community.


So I’m finding myself in a bit of a gray area:
I’m not using AI to write my stories, only to translate them, but the end result still seems to trigger the AI detection policies.


Has anyone else here dealt with something similar?
Are there translation workflows or tools that the site tends to accept?
Or is there some other way to demonstrate that the work is original?


I’d really appreciate any suggestions from other authors who may have navigated this before.


Thanks!

I've been in the same situation before, although this was a couple of years ago. I would never use AI to write my stories, and I think tools like Grammarly are overrated, but I have used AI translation software to publish some of my stories in German and French. I don't really know either language, but I still checked the translations using the same program to make sure (as best as I could) that there were no errors.

Several of the stories were accepted without problems, but a few others were rejected for AI use, even though they weren't written with AI, only translated. I ended up having to rephrase paragraphs and edit out chunks of text, redoing parts of the translation in a more piecemeal fashion to satisfy the AI checker software, but that was to the detriment of stories because they were no longer exact translations.

When the rejected translated stories were finally accepted and published, I decided that it wasn't worth the trouble to keep translating them for Literotica, and it doesn't make sense to pay a professional translator so that I can publish them for free.

 

[Bamagan]

If you already appealed the rejection(s) and the site still declined to publish them, there's not really anything else you can do in terms of 'proving' originality (and if you didn't appeal the rejection with a note to the editor explaining your situation, you should consider doing so).

In general, machine translation and machine generation tend to produce very similar outputs, so it's not very surprising that whatever the site is doing to detect AI products would get triggered by both. It's also not really shocking that human editing of machine translation would tend to leave it mostly intact, since you'd probably be looking for poor translations of idiomatic expressions or words with multiple possible meanings. By intact, I mean that the compositional structure of sentences and paragraphs is probably not being changed much, because the software generally makes those correctly, at least in a technical sense, so there may not seem to be any need to address them.

You can search the forum for additional threads, as you're not alone. Rejection for translation is somewhat common, and there's a load of advice (not all of it necessarily useful) about other steps you can attempt.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Hi everyone,


I’m looking for some advice from other authors here because I’ve run into a situation I’m not quite sure how to solve. I’ve been a published author on Literotica in the past and previously released a 10-chapter story on the site. English is not my native language, although I can read and write it at a fairly high level. Because of that, my usual workflow is to write my stories first in Spanish (my native language) and then translate them into English.

For translation I use software tools, which I understand today often involve some form of AI. However, the stories themselves are completely written by me. The translator is only used to convert the text from Spanish into English. Recently, my last three submissions have been rejected for AI use. I’ve tried to address this as carefully as possible. After translating, I read the entire English version myself, make edits, and sometimes even have proofreaders or editors review it to make sure the translation didn’t introduce anything that wasn’t in the original text.

Despite this, I keep getting the same result. I’ve been advised to publish the stories in Spanish under the Non-English category. The problem is that this section appears to receive very little traffic, and realistically the stories would likely never be read there. My goal is simply to share my work with the wider community.

So I’m finding myself in a bit of a gray area:
I’m not using AI to write my stories, only to translate them, but the end result still seems to trigger the AI detection policies.

Has anyone else here dealt with something similar?
Are there translation workflows or tools that the site tends to accept?
Or is there some other way to demonstrate that the work is original?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions from other authors who may have navigated this before.

Thanks!

Sadly for people writing in languages other than English. Any translation tool nowadays will have added AI. The result will get picked up more often than not.

The solution is to write in English if you want to publish in English. That is probably not what you want to hear.

I’m not commenting on the rights and wrongs, simply stating what the current approach by the site will inevitably lead to.

 

[AG31]

@EmilyMiller advised you to write in English. I, for one, would not mind, maybe would like, reading an author who was writing in a second language. It would probably help to be warned up front.

 

[EmilyMiller]

@EmilyMiller advised you to write in English. I, for one, would not mind, maybe would like, reading an author who was writing in a second language. It would probably help to be warned up front.

We have many excellent authors here for whom English is a second language.

 

[EmilyMiller]

We have many excellent authors here for whom English is a second language.

Trying desperately not to mention Aussies - must be a a good girl

 

[SmilingLez]

Hi everyone,


I’m looking for some advice from other authors here because I’ve run into a situation I’m not quite sure how to solve. I’ve been a published author on Literotica in the past and previously released a 10-chapter story on the site. English is not my native language, although I can read and write it at a fairly high level. Because of that, my usual workflow is to write my stories first in Spanish (my native language) and then translate them into English.

For translation I use software tools, which I understand today often involve some form of AI. However, the stories themselves are completely written by me. The translator is only used to convert the text from Spanish into English. Recently, my last three submissions have been rejected for AI use. I’ve tried to address this as carefully as possible. After translating, I read the entire English version myself, make edits, and sometimes even have proofreaders or editors review it to make sure the translation didn’t introduce anything that wasn’t in the original text.

Despite this, I keep getting the same result. I’ve been advised to publish the stories in Spanish under the Non-English category. The problem is that this section appears to receive very little traffic, and realistically the stories would likely never be read there. My goal is simply to share my work with the wider community.

So I’m finding myself in a bit of a gray area:
I’m not using AI to write my stories, only to translate them, but the end result still seems to trigger the AI detection policies.

Has anyone else here dealt with something similar?
Are there translation workflows or tools that the site tends to accept?
Or is there some other way to demonstrate that the work is original?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions from other authors who may have navigated this before.

Thanks!

I am assuming you used some sort of AI tool to write your post. What I would do is send a message to @Laurel explain everything to her and see if you get a reply. You might not. But it's better than doing nothing

 

[KittyOfSteele]

We have many excellent authors here for whom English is a second language.

Esto.

Yo llegué aquí hace seis años, y fue gracias a este sitio que me motivé a escribir y publicar directamente en inglés. A veces siento que no me comparo con los angloparlantes, especialmente cuando hay profesionales del idioma como StillStunned, y ensayos como el de pintar con las palabras de onehitwanda me hacen sentir más humillada que motivada. Igual sigo escribiendo. Tras seis o siete años escribiendo en un idioma que no es el mío ya es raro que haga ficción en castellano, aunque mis poemas lo son, y no sé si quiera darle un intento al inglés ya que la métrica es más abstracta... pero eso es otro tema.

Literotica no tiene una comunidad gigante de hispanoparlantes, pero podrías aportar al sitio en español, si quieres.

ADDENDUM: Este es el sitio en español. La categoría non-english está muerta porque es un rastro de cuando el sitio no tenía soportes para otros idiomas. Si te das cuenta, hay historias que se publicaron hoy 11 de Marzo.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Has anyone else here dealt with something similar?
Are there translation workflows or tools that the site tends to accept?
Or is there some other way to demonstrate that the work is original?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions from other authors who may have navigated this before.

AFAIK the only translation workflow acceptable under Literotica policy is to have a human translate the material.

Translation is creative work, and legally recognised as such. Translators own copyright over their translations unless they've passed that copyright on to somebody else via contract (work-for-hire type situations).

One of Literotica's requirements for posting stories is that you own the copyright to the material you're posting. (Or in practice, for things like collaborations, that you at least have permission from the copyright owners.) With an AI-translated work, the copyright status of the translation is murky and it's not clear that you fully own the resulting work.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Esto.

Yo llegué aquí hace seis años, y fue gracias a este sitio que me motivé a escribir y publicar directamente en inglés. A veces siento que no me comparo con los angloparlantes, especialmente cuando hay profesionales del idioma como StillStunned, y ensayos como el de pintar con las palabras de onehitwanda me hacen sentir más humillada que motivada. Igual sigo escribiendo. Tras seis o siete años escribiendo en un idioma que no es el mío ya es raro que haga ficción en castellano, aunque mis poemas lo son, y no sé si quiera darle un intento al inglés ya que la métrica es más abstracta... pero eso es otro tema.

Literotica no tiene una comunidad gigante de hispanoparlantes, pero podrías aportar al sitio en español, si quieres.

ADDENDUM: Este es el sitio en español. La categoría non-english está muerta porque es un rastro de cuando el sitio no tenía soportes para otros idiomas. Si te das cuenta, hay historias que se publicaron hoy 11 de Marzo.

I’m sure it’s a challenge. But it’s wonderful that you feel this way.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I’m sure it’s a challenge. But it’s wonderful that you feel this way.

It was mostly stage fright. It's the same issue I've seen from people when they are learning how to speak it. They refuse to do it because they're afraid they'll be mocked for it, even among people who are at their same level of English.

I'm not saying it's easy, but the only way to learn a language is by fucking It up. We've all been there, we just don't remember because we were toddlers when we learned our first language. The only way through is by going into the darkness itself.

E: Autocorrect got really funny by turning fright into freight

 

[DellaLu]

Sadly for people writing in languages other than English. Any translation tool nowadays will have added AI. The result will get picked up more often than not.

The solution is to write in English if you want to publish in English. That is probably not what you want to hear.

I’m not commenting on the rights and wrongs, simply stating what the current approach by the site will inevitably lead to.

I agree.

I'm Dutch and, fortunately for me, Dutch is (in my opinion) such a crude languague that it is totally unfit for the kind of erotica I want to write. So I write my stories in English to begin with.
The big drawback is of course the vocabulary, which is less. But dictionaries, either a book or online, comes in handy and with time the vocabulary will expand so that the subtleties that native writers can put into their stories will come as well (I hope)

And then there's the grammar and spelling... That's a thing as well.
I'm not afraid to make mistakes and if people can't stand those grammar and spelling mistakes. Well fine, then it's their problem.
But I am glad that I've got an editor now. Saves me a lot of negative comments and 1s ratings ;-)

TLDR:
As a non native speaker, just start writing in English, find an editor and don't be afraid to fuck up from time to time.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I agree.

I'm Dutch and, fortunately for me, Dutch is (in my opinion) such a crude languague that it is totally unfit for the kind of erotica I want to write. So I write my stories in English to begin with.
The big drawback is of course the vocabulary, which is less. But dictionaries, either a book or online, comes in handy and with time the vocabulary will expand so that the subtleties that native writers can put into their stories will come as well (I hope)

And then there's the grammar and spelling... That's a thing as well.
I'm not afraid to make mistakes and if people can't stand those grammar and spelling mistakes. Well fine, then it's their problem.
But I am glad that I've got an editor now. Saves me a lot of negative comments and 1s ratings ;-)

TLDR:
As a non native speaker, just start writing in English, find an editor and don't be afraid to fuck up from time to time.

At least one of my favorite authors here
- one I have beta read for - has English as a second language. And he is highly regarded by others as well. His name, @redgarters and his work is really amazing.

 

[onehitwanda]

Trying desperately not to mention Aussies - must be a a good girl

 

[EmilyMiller]

View attachment 2602367

We know which button, right ?

 

[onehitwanda]

We know which button, right ?

There's a picture of us in the dictionary under the word "misbehaviour" - no words of explanation, no caption, just you and I staring owlishly out from the carnage and glitter.

 

[CalBishForNow]

English is my first language, but I speak a little French. When I wanted to work on a story when I was worried about someone reading over my shoulder, I did it in French. Add up various segments and I have almost 2000 words in French from two stories so far, no doubt more to come at some point.

It made me wonder about the possibility of publishing both versions of one story. You can't publish the same story twice, Lit doesn't want to be cluttered up with redundant content; you can't use AI-translated stories for the same reason you can't use AI-created stories; you can't publish a translation of someone else's story without their permission on general principles; but can you publish a translation of your own story? I don't see why not... It won't be any time soon, but maybe someday.

As a non native speaker, just start writing in English, find an editor and don't be afraid to fuck up from time to time.

Just out of curiosity, do you mean an editor from real life, or from Lit's volunteer editor system, or what? And how much fluency do you want them to have with your native language?

 

[EmilyMiller]

Just out of curiosity, do you mean an editor from real life, or from Lit's volunteer editor system, or what? And how much fluency do you want them to have with your native language?

I’ve never got anything from the listed editors beyond tumbleweed. YMMV. But if you make acquaintances / friends with other authors here, many will be willing to help out - assuming they are not in the middle of their magnum opus.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I’ve never got anything from the listed editors beyond tumbleweed. YMMV. But if you make acquaintances / friends with other authors here, many will be willing to help out - assuming they are not in the middle of their magnum opus.

Without getting into names, I just did some beta / proof reading for a new writer here. Someone I hardly know. But their work was in areas that interest me, and they seemed nice .

 

[CalBishForNow]

I’ve never got anything from the listed editors beyond tumbleweed. YMMV. But if you make acquaintances / friends with other authors here, many will be willing to help out - assuming they are not in the middle of their magnum opus.

I sought an editor there once and got it. I don't remember if they were the very first one I approached, but I think I'd remember if it took multiple days or if discussions started and broke down with more than one of them. Maybe I was unusually lucky.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I sought an editor there once and got it. I don't remember if they were the very first one I approached, but I think I'd remember if it took multiple days or if discussions started and broke down with more than one of them. Maybe I was unusually lucky.

I tried quite a few. Only one replied and that was to say they didn’t edit stories in a category that their details said they did. As I say YMMV.

 

[AG31]

I'm Dutch and, fortunately for me, Dutch is (in my opinion) such a crude languague

Interesting. Do you know enough about German to render an opinion about it?

 

[DellaLu]

Just out of curiosity, do you mean an editor from real life, or from Lit's volunteer editor system, or what? And how much fluency do you want them to have with your native language?

I got my editor here on Lit. He read my stories, saw in my bio that I'm Dutch and volunteerd to edit my stories. He's American and has absolutely no fluency with the Dutch language and, as I write my stories in English, in my opinion an editor doesn't need to have it either.

 

[DellaLu]

Interesting. Do you know enough about German to render an opinion about it?

I understand German quite well if spoken to, but the German writing... Oh so frigging hard...
So sadly no.