(Yicai) Dec. 11 -- Artificial intelligence greatly reduced translation costs of Chinese literary works, but more technological breakthroughs are needed to further promote Chinese literature overseas, according to experts.

AI is facing challenges, such as the inability to accurately translate terms unique to Chinese culture, Yang Chen, vice president of China Literature, the e-book platform of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings, said at the second Shanghai International Online Literature Week.

In February, China Literature set up an AI translation technology research team to apply AI capabilities to translate online literary works to improve translations from Chinese to English and other languages. It also set up a lexicon with millions of terms and matched them with Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese languages according to their grammar and punctuation marks.

However, translation quality and the acceptance of AI translations by readers are some issues that must be addressed.

"With the help of AI, the translation efficiency of online texts has been greatly improved, from an average of more than 10 chapters to thousands of chapters a day, an increase of nearly 100 times," Yang noted. "Moreover, the translation cost dropped 90 percent."

Translations of online literary works are expensive and insufficient, so it would be better to invite overseas writers and train them, said Tong Ye, chief executive officer of Funstory.ai, a Chinese developer of AI-assisted translation and production system targeting literature.

It is impossible to use ChatGPT to translate online literary works, as it refuses to translate some content outside the safety fence, resulting in quite a lot of missing translations, Tong noted.

As of the end of last year, more than 9,000 Chinese online literary translations were released overseas, a two-fold increase from a year earlier.

About 3,600 online translations had been released on WebNovel, China Literature's overseas platform, as of Dec. 31, last year, up 110 percent from a year earlier. Some 238 of the novels on WebNovel were read over 10 million times, while nine were read over 100 million times.

Last year, the overseas revenue of China's online literature industry increased 40 percent to more than CNY4 billion (USD560 million) from the previous year. Chinese literary works were translated into over 20 languages, reaching readers from more than 40 countries and regions in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa.

Editors: Zhang Yushuo, Futura Costaglione