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Denmark Clarifies AI Translations Do Not Qualify for Public Lending Rights

Translation Software

Business Honor
10 May, 2025

Denmark updates rules, excluding AI post-editing from public lending rights and translator credits.

The Danish Translators’ Association and the Danish Authors’ Society issued a statement highlighting an issue regarding AI translation software. They disclosed that some people had been falsely awarded public funds for books, claiming to have translated materials when in fact they had just made edits to translations produced by machines.

The Public Lending Right (PLR) is a mechanism that pays authors, translators and other producers for lending their works to the public is at the heart of the dispute. However, since translations generated by AI are not regarded as original translations and editing them fails to meet with the legal requirements for PLR payments. The Danish government responded by revising its regulations to make it clear that PLR compensation will not be given for translations produced by AI and that which are only corrected by humans.

As a result, the Danish Translators’ Association, the Danish Authors’ Society and the Danish Publishers Association have agreed on new industry guidelines. They stated that AI post-editors should not be credited as translators. Instead, a note stating, “The Danish version of this book has been edited by [editor’s name],” must be included for all AI-edited works.

Additionally, to stop publishers from developing translations to train extensive language models without the translator's permission, the Danish Translators' Association revised its model contract. The new rules make sure that translators are credited for original work and not for post-editing machine translations. This move is part of the growing conversation about the role of AI translation tools in publishing and the importance of maintaining clear distinctions between human translators and machine-generated content.