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Two Alice books, translated end to end

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, English to French, put through the Libris Translate autopilot as a two-volume series. Here is what came out, the measured figures, what went wrong, and every file you need to judge for yourself.

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One human edit, declared

The analysis took the name “Alice Liddel” from the publisher's metadata, not from the text, and locked it as the series name of Alice: the output said “Alice Liddel” more than 560 times. On 1 October 2026, a person corrected that single Series Bible entry, and the two matching glossary entries, to “Alice”. Libris Translate's own propagation then rewrote the 71 passages concerned, without calling a model and without editing any passage by hand. Everything else is the autopilot's raw output. Both versions of the Series Bible are in the downloads.

Excerpts, as the autopilot wrote them

Omissions are marked […]. The French is copied from the downloadable files, untouched.

A pun: tale and tail, volume 1, chapter III

English

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.

“It is a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” […]

French

« — J’ai une longue et triste histoire qui traîne derrière moi ! » dit la Souris en se tournant vers Alice et en soupirant.

« — Elle est longue, ta queue, c’est vrai, dit Alice en regardant avec étonnement la queue de la Souris, mais pourquoi dis-tu qu’elle est triste ? » […]

The pun is carried by an image: the story “trails behind” the Mouse. In the same passage, the Mouse's tail-shaped poem comes out as prose, without rhyme or layout.

The same cat in both volumes: Dinah, volume 2, chapter I

English

The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose […]

French

Voici comment Dinah lavait la figure de ses petits : elle commençait par maintenir le pauvre petit par l’oreille avec une patte, puis, de l’autre, lui frottait toute la figure à rebrousse-poil, en partant du nez. […]

The Series Bible records Dinah, Alice's cat, from volume 1. Volume 2 keeps her name as the Bible fixed it, with no new decision.

Invented words: Jabberwocky, volume 2, chapter I

English

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

French

C’était braisille, et les toves soupluants

Gyrent et gimblent dans le wabe ;

Les borogoves étaient tous misérêles,

Et les raths déchez briflèrent.

Some portmanteau words are invented in French (“braisille”, “soupluants”), others are left as they are (“gimblent”, “wabe”). When Humpty Dumpty quotes the poem again in chapter VI, the stanza is translated another way (“Gyraient et vrillaient dans l’ouabe”): the autopilot did not align the two.

Measured figures

MeasureAlice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
Source words26,53029,207
Passages scored7891
Working timeabout 4 h 30about 4 h 10
Review rounds33
Autopilot verdictblocked, 37 passages with open pointsblocked, 52 passages with open points
Average quality score, out of 10061.258.8
Good · fair · weak · poor passages33 · 13 · 4 · 2838 · 2 · 9 · 42
Estimated · actual cost0 · 00 · 0
  • “Blocked” means the autopilot stopped after its three rounds with review points still open, and did not declare the book ready. The files below were exported from that state.
  • The scores are those of the autopilot's quality judge, read from the reports below. They were not recomputed after the edit.
  • The cost is zero because the subscription has no price per call, so Libris Translate recorded none. With a pay-per-token API, the estimate is shown before each paid step.

How it was run

  • Sources: the Standard Ebooks editions, with John Tenniel's illustrations.
  • Software: development builds of Libris Translate 0.25.0 on a test server, on 1 October 2026. The server was updated nine times during the run, and each job resumed on its own.
  • Model: GPT-6 Luna translates, through a ChatGPT subscription. GPT-6 Sol only judges quality and retries the passages the autopilot escalates, about 29% of calls in a 75-minute sample. The provider was never switched for the whole book.
  • Autopilot: analysis, Book Bible and Series Bible, translation, review, consistency checks, arbitration and export, in at most three review rounds, with nobody approving the steps.
  • Incidents: a reset of the test server erased a first attempt, and a context window set too small made the first autopilot pass of volume 1 fail. It was corrected and run again. The working times below leave those waits out.

Limits and weak points

  • Register: “tu” and “vous” change between the same characters (Father William, the King and Queen, “Who are you?”). It is the main cause of the open points.
  • Verse: poems and refrains often come out as prose, without rhyme, and some refrains are left in English.
  • Scores: 28 passages of volume 1 and 42 of volume 2 are rated poor. Read the reports to see which, and why.
  • Glossary: the translation departs from a locked term in places, for “Mock Turtle” (26 times) and “Gryphon” (14) in volume 1, “Kitty” and “Knight” (4 each) in volume 2.
  • The bilingual EPUBs leave the illustrations out; the translated EPUBs keep them, hence their size.

This is a first draft: Libris Translate does not replace the translator's revision, and nothing here should be published without it.

Download everything

The files are published byte for byte as the test server exported them. Their SHA-256 fingerprints are in SHA256SUMS.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

The series

Provenance

The original texts (1865 and 1871) and John Tenniel's illustrations are in the public domain, in the United States and in France: Lewis Carroll died in 1898 and Tenniel in 1914. The source EPUBs come from Standard Ebooks, who dedicate their work to the public domain (CC0 1.0). The French translation was produced by Libris Translate with the assistance of AI models, and every EPUB says so in its metadata.

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