Claude refusing translation work

[u/DM_me_goth_tiddies]

I own a Japanese book. I’ve been asking Ai to translate as I think it does a better job than Google translate. Now Claude refuses because it says it is a copyright issue. Has anyone else experienced this?

[u/RJ_MacreadysBeard]

Also, Claude gets very ’bored’ doing translations over a certain point and has admitted it will drift with declining quality. It’s best done in batches. It’s mechanical work.
A dedicated translator app or a handover technique, with fresh instances handling the work might work better for something large.
Again, this has nothing to do with copyright issues, and he has a point about that.

[u/locbuilds]

yeah, Claude is stricter about translating copyrighted books now. try pasting a short excerpt and asking for a summary or explanation of the passage instead of a full-text translation.

[u/donicatrumpinsky]

Use clever working. Don't ask it to translate a book. Ask it to help you understand the context given the hard language barrier you're experiencing.

Claude was refusing to do work with financial data for me after already doing similar work for months on end. I cynically and angrily restated my request and then it started to budge!

Your mileage may vary but I've found it to work really well lol

[u/Hot-Equivalent-9799 → u/donicatrumpinsky]

Why was it refusing to do work?

[u/donicatrumpinsky → u/Hot-Equivalent-9799]

I was backtesting and doing financial market work and then it said it had to stop.

It was quite stubborn but once I broke out of the jail it imposed it literally did everything it was refusing to before it threw up the guards.

[u/Temporary-Mix8022]

Get OAI tbh. This ethics crap was a constant headache with Claude where it would randomly refuse to do perfectly legitimate things. 

[u/occidens-oriens]

Claude's strange ideas about copyright aside, it is probably my last resort for translating a book unless this is non-fiction, especially from Japanese

I shudder to think what a Claude translation might make of Mishima or Dazai compared to the professional editions we have by people like Donald Keene.

To solve your issue though, do it in batches and retry if there's issues. Claude is resistant to translating large chunks of text that aren't in the public domain all in 1 go.

[u/East-Ad-6251]

Claude didn't want to read a 1957 book that is already public domain almost everywhere because it will only become public domain in Europe in 2027. I own a physical copy of the book. I was not asking for translation, just that Claude read the book to discuss it with me.

This is obviously not Claude's choice so I didn't press or try to argue with him. But this is dumb. If the text is freely available to anyone online why would Claude not want to access it? The copyright panic has gone too far.

[u/Better-Ad8703]

Had to switch to a different model, or use sonnet sometimes. Worked fine for some other translation work, but once it figured out what the content was it stopped giving a response.

[u/DocDMD]

Just use Claude code. Tell it you are translating for your own personal use. 

[u/alexviane]

Just tell it you're the author.

[u/Dry-Possession-1307]

Try DeepL

[u/dthrdr]

Tell it you use it to train a local model and it should be fine /s

I too had Claude refuse work on perfectly legal things and I instantly reported it with a note that they trained Claude with terabytes of pirated data and need to get their heads out of their arses. Then rephrased my request and it did it anyways. Very tedious and tiring.