zlacker

Since you chose Harry Potter specifically: the official Spanish translations were always released several months behind the US. Therefore fan groups gathered to make their own versions by scanning the originals on release night, splitting the chapters among subgroups, translate them in parallel, and then merge them back together. All of this in less than a week.

So while certainly not the case for most books, if you have a pirate Harry Potter then there's a fair chance that an actual human did the translation.

Unrelated, sometimes I'd get a fake unofficial chapter and then I'd have to decide on-the-fly whether Draco undressing Harry felt in line with J.K. Rowling's universe so far.

>>probab+(OP)
This is also how many manga "scanlation" groups work. Some of the translations are incredible, especially of comedy manga. One, called Grand Blue, is ostensibly a manga about a young man joining a scuba diving club while in uni. In reality, it's a drinking gag manga with an incredibly funny and absurd sense of humor. I can't read Japanese, but apparently the main scanlation group is incredibly good at translating the japanese jokes into english, even going so far to completely rewrite the jokes but keeping the core idea of the joke intact with quite in-depth footnotes explaining and justifying their changes. The translation notes are fascinating in their own right.