Kindle just offered to translate my novel into 5 languages… > Likes and Comments

Kindle just offered to translate Blood and Caviar into 5 languages…

I received an invitation today from Amazon for their Kindle Translate service. They’re offering to create AI-powered translations of Blood and Caviar into Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese — free of charge.

I’ve been looking into it and the early official numbers look decent (they claim average ratings of 4+ stars), but I’d rather hear from actual authors who have already used it.
Has anyone here tried Kindle Translate yet?

I’m especially curious about the real quality of the translations — not the marketing version. How did the dialogue hold up? Did the tone and atmosphere survive? Any issues with political or cultural nuances?

I’d genuinely appreciate any honest feedback before I decide whether to go ahead (and with which languages).

Thanks in advance.
— Nikolay

I wouldn't recommend AI-powered translations. I have tried it before, and AI regularly misses not only cultural but also linguistic nuances. I ended up discarding it completely and translating everything sentence by sentence.

I would imagine Kindle Translate AI to fail spectacularly. But if you want to try it, I’d be happy to check samples of the German translation, as I am a native German speaker.

I write in German too, so Jefferson's offer is the useful test. The danger is not broken grammar. It is a sentence that sounds clean and still points at the wrong person in the room.

Dialogue is where that shows first. Tone lives in what someone does not say. A model can fill that silence with something polite. That is not a translation. It is a new decision.

If Amazon is offering it for free, I would still sit with one chapter before I let five languages go live. Stars do not tell you whether the atmosphere survived.

It's scary. I'm an Italian author, I paid a lot to translate some of my short horror stories, but I don't think machine translation is able to substitute a human translator for more than an email. Books are full of nuances and moods. I work very well with Jennifer and we communicate a lot to "translate" these aspects. (Sorry for any mistake, I'm not native English).

That talk with Jennifer is the translation, Rossella. You paid for someone who can ask what the mood is doing.

A machine can finish an email because an email wants to be clear. A horror story often wants the opposite.

Request one translation and ask a native reader to read your book - for example in German, you have here in this chat your volunteers :-)