Oddly enough, my wife was recently involved in a project to translate historical crime novels from Norwegian; since all the available late 20th century Scandinavian crime novels have already been translated and turned into popular TV series, the plan was to go further back. Into the 1930s. The first cut was done with LLMs, but encountered the problem that (a) Norwegian itself has changed noticeably since then, in both major dialects, and (b) the machine translation deteriorated on large sections, resulting in entirely missing paragraphs and pages in a few places. Not to mention the usual translation issues (what police role does lensman map to?) and localisation (to what extent should the casual antisemitism be left in or removed?)

Translation is never a bijective process. It's never quite the same experience in translation as it is in the original, due to the cultural differences between reader and writer. Larger in this case because 1930s Norway is very different even from 2020s Norway.

Ultimately this was not a success due to marketing difficulties; it is very difficult to get a book noticed.

( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Iron-Chariot-Nordic-Crime-Library/d... )

> high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English

You make it sound like an easier task than training an LLM. I'd argue it's not obvious, and would assume the contrary.

Copyrights and statutes don't allow them to do that. The mandate of the National Library maybe permits them to make an LLM through (though I won't at all be surprised if someone sues them anyway).