A book of Portuguese poetry

Given how much complaining I do about the shortcomings of AI, you’d be forgiven for thinking I never use it.

That’s not true – I do use it occasionally. But not to translate – for research.

Let me explain.

I was recently translating a book sample from German to English, which features part of a poem that was originally written in Portuguese (I don’t speak Portuguese). 

As a professional translator, I don’t just translate the German translation of the Portuguese poem myself. That would be too easy! No, in cases like these, I need to find out if the Portuguese poem has already been published in English translation. 

And that’s when Google doesn’t always come up with the goods, so I do ask ChatGPT. In this case, it was able to tell me which book I could likely find the poem in, and then I ordered the book.

Yes, I bought the book out of my own pocket! It might seem over the top to some people, but those are the lengths I go to as a translator to use exactly the right words – be they my own, or those of another translator!

And in doing so, I get to read poetry I probably never would have known about otherwise!