@Gargron much of my work is as a legal translator (evidence, wiretaps, court filings, etc.)

The party that relies on machine translations or worse, AI translations, is the party that will lose the case. Any translator can pick holes in an AI translation big enough to cross through with a herd of elephants. Those "translations" lack nuance.

@cstross @Gargron
and the sort of awards that give a book the sheen of "worth reading".

My cred: I've translated more books than I can carry. Both fiction and technical.
My current position is that use of AI in translation is malpractice.

@cstross @Gargron
Machine translations are more of a hindrance than a help, for translators. If you don't know both languages well, having an automated dictionary lookup could possibly be useful - but if you're a translator, and especially a translator of fiction, having a nuanceless draft will only take more time to figure out. And it will be irritating time, because reading mistranslations is a pain. Editing one's own drafts is hard enough!

As to B: Editors rely on readers, reviews /...