Tim Newcomb Must Die

The Responsibilities of Translation

Edit (22 Feb 2025): It seems many of the links I used here no longer work. This is because newcomblivrariapress.com has since been taken down. The homepage has been archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240923093834/https://www.newcomblivrariapress.com/ but the other pages I cite are unavailable. I also refer to a groups.io page which now requires an account to view (it did not when I made this post). It has not been archived, but a small portion of it can be seen in Google’s description when you search

"Tim Newcomb" site:groups.io

The available excerpt reads:

"Tim Newcomb" has even written "translator's afterwords", probably also with AI. It boils my blood... Started by Caitlin Stephens @ May 6 · Most recent…

The remaining three links should function correctly. Now, back to your regularly scheduled post.

I’m going to immediately undercut the provocative nature of the title by revealing that Tim Newcomb is not a real person. It is a name, probably an alias, used by someone acting highly unethically. Whoever it is, whether Tim Newcomb is their real name or not, I do not want them dead, that would be an enormous overreaction.

If you go on Amazon and search the books section for “Tim Newcomb”, you will find a curious thing: a number of academic texts, by a variety of authors (most of them German), with cover illustrations clearly produced by artificial intelligence. These books are all translated into English by someone using the name Tim Newcomb. A visit to the website of publisher Newcomb Livraria Press (

https://www.newcomblivrariapress.com

) shows published English translations of countless works by such authors as Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, C. G. Jung, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. Most are translated from German, some from French, and a few from Latin. What’s more, the ‘Translator’s Notes’ section of this site, one of the only sections with dates, only goes back to 28 May 2019 (the other section with dates only goes back to 2023). If we take this as a starting date, Tim would have produced translations of the complete works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all in the space of five years. For the sake of comparison: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, the only complete edition in English, took 24 years; there is no English edition of the complete works of Hegel; the Marx/Engels Collected Works, which is the largest English-language translation of Marx’s work, took 29 years; the complete works of Heidegger in German, the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, has been in the process of being published since 1975 and has yet to be completed; the Stanford Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, begun in 1995, has yet to be completed. So in five years Tim has accomplished what has taken teams of translators a combined 82 years and counting!

Needless to say, I find myself a little sceptical of this. I will not be purchasing any copies of the translations, but the afterwords are available for free on Tim’s website, so let’s take a look at one of them to see how qualified Tim really is. Simply glancing through one text, ‘Proustian Subjectivity, Nietzschean Transhumanism and Post-Modern Deconstructivism’, I find the sentence

Aesthetics is severely underdeveloped in Proust compared to his protégé Nietzsche. (see here: https://www.newcomblivrariapress.com/afterwords/proust)

This is an interesting claim. According to the meaning of the word “protégé”, this would be claiming that Proust taught or inspired Nietzsche in some way. The first volume of Proust’s major work, In Search of Lost Time, was published in 1913; Nietzsche’s first major work, and his only work devoted entirely to aesthetics, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872. Nietzsche’s last ever writings were in January 1889, during his mental break, and from then until his death in 1900 he never wrote another word. But perhaps Tim simply made an honest error here, it happens sometimes. A later sentence reads:

He helped develop the religion of postmodernism, as shown by his influence on Woolf and Michel Foucault, one of the fathers of postmodern deconstructivism, which replaces logos with power as the core animating force of human reality. Foucault wrote, "Proust's work is an immense labyrinthine system in which the most insignificant details of life are sometimes given symbolic meaning."

Now, leaving aside the factual errors here (Foucault was not ‘one of the fathers of postmodern deconstructivism’, he in fact had a quite-famous argument with deconstruction’s founder, Jacques Derrida, for just one example), Foucault never said this (most of Foucault’s comments on Proust, rare though they are, are actually somewhat negative). In fact, if you Google the quote you get 9 instances of its use, each one of which is in a book (supposedly by Proust) published by Newcomb Livraria Press, and all 9 books use it in the same paragraph, because they reprint the same afterword. Aside from numerous factual and typographical errors, this kind of falsified quote occurs repeatedly in this post. Another example attributes to Proust the phrase:

The memory of things past is not necessarily the memory of things as they were

Of course, Proust never said this. It does, however, have a citation this time, so let’s look at that. The citation reads:

À la recherche du temps perdu

The title of Proust’s 7-volume, 4000-page novel. Nothing more specific is given. This post is from 3 July 2023, and all the books in which it appears were published in 2023 (amusingly, this piece of information can be found on their copyright page, because apparently copyright applies to this; these pages claim the text is translated “from the original German”, even though Proust wrote in French). Before Newcomb's use of it, the phrase occurs once in a text with a date attached, which is in the description (provided here: https://nbhap.com/sounds/new-releases-sasami-king-hannah-black-sea-dahu) of Federico Albanese's record Before And Now Seems Infinite (the phrase is also used in an undated description of the record on a site selling it, although I cannot verify the authenticity of that site). After this, however, it’s used in a 6 June 2023 blogpost (see here:

Sun-dappled asphalt or 'An Ode to Summer Backroads'

), where it is attributed to Proust, but framed as a summary of a general claim Proust makes rather than a direct quote.

It will not be surprising, then, that I believe Tim Newcomb is using artificial intelligence to produce his translations. There are certain uses of artificial intelligence which are, in my view, ethically acceptable, but this is not one of them. For one, readers will come away with terrible understandings of the texts, based on translations that are mangled at best. Further, Tim is flooding the market with low quality products (sometimes publishing the same texts multiple times) which make downright false claims, and which lack any evidence of quality control. The reader may be familiar with the phenomenon of low-quality, automated reprints of public domain books being sold on various sites, particularly Amazon (I was tricked by one nearly 8 years ago and can personally attest that they’re awful). What Tim Newcomb is doing here is the logical next step of that scam. And Tim presents it in a misleading way. The books do not describe themselves as “generated by AI”, they claim to be “translated by Tim Newcomb”. The publisher “Newcomb Livraria Press”, which I’m willing to bet is just Tim, pretends to be a real business. When you visit the website you find a page for ‘Open Positions’ (see: https://www.newcomblivrariapress.com/open-positions) claiming they are looking for three “translation assistants”. The contacts page, as an aside, directs you only to an Instagram account: no address, no phone number, no email address, no employee details, nothing.

If the claim “Tim Newcomb must die” is justified, it is insofar as we understand by it that this must be stopped. What can be done? I don’t know. A thread I found suggests that relevant copyright holders have been notified of this in regard to Newcomb’s “translations” of Jung and Hesse (see here: https://groups.io/g/ta-members/topic/livraria_press/105182231), but that is the only evidence I have found of such a thing, and several of those books remain available for sale regardless. All I can think to do is to share the work of Caitlin Stephens, who posted that groups.io message and notified a copyright holder; she is currently undertaking the gargantuan task of actually translating Jung’s works, for Princeton University Press. One volume has been published so far, and can be found here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691244167/jung-on-ignatius-of-loyolas-spiritual-exercises. I have no conflict of interest, I’ve never interacted with Stephens in my life, but I wanted to share this to help support responsible translation practices.