Category: Technology

Emergency! Emergency! The Toolists are coming! Everybody to get from street!

Actually, they’re already here in large numbers.

Some translators continue to assert that AI can be useful to a translator as a tool to survive. And translation organizations—sadly even the ones ostensibly controlled by practictioners rather than agencies—are doing little to dissuade freelancers from this delusion.

These AI toolist translators and their organizations either don’t understand—I doubt that such stupidity is the reason—or find it too painful to admit that the long-standing structure of the translation business for freelancers effectively precludes almost all freelancers from effective survival strategies to enable them to continue translating, AI use or not, because the only clients most can acquire are already using AI to replace them. Other clients are essentially not available to most freelancers.

Specifically, although it shouldn’t even need to be mentioned at this point—go ahead and wonder why I mention it—the freelance translation world is a two-tiered brokered business, in which freelance translators don’t have (and many freelancers have enjoyed not having to have) access to and interaction with the entities that will not be using AI for at least a short while yet to replace them. Most of those entities are not in the translation business, although even they will become rarer as things progress.

Technologies introduced decades ago—I’m, of course, not talking about AI—welcomed and nurtured a population of freelance translators uniquely unsuited to survive. Remote work is one reason. That has enabled working isolated and protected from interaction with anyone who can judge qualifications and skills. Clients are allowed to believe that the translation process is a black box, although they are very often also led to believe that there are thousands of expert translators in the box, which they are not allowed to peek into.

Yet another aspect of the crisis is that the population of translators that was nurtured by technology that enabled remote work is one that is heavily populated by people who don’t like interacting with other human beings to start with. That is a death sentence in a situation where you need to develop clients other than those in the translation business, particularly those in Japan, although direct interaction with translation consumers, regardless of their location, is the best way to convince them that you’re just not another broker but an actual professional practitioner.

Faced with this environment, in-house work is arguably one survival path. That said, it most often requires being close to where the work is. Many people are not close to where the work is, and in fact may probably enjoy being distant from where the work is. Additionally, there will be not nearly enough in-house positions—and there are almost no in-house translator positions in translation companies—to satisfy people who wish to translate for a living.

The other path for people who can do it is to go back to school or somehow otherwise obtain a knowledge base and skill set that is not related to translation or language and would be the basis of a career even without translation. Translation and language alone are not going to provide a career path. That has ended, unless you wish to remain in academia and train yet more people who won’t have careers as translators waiting for them upon graduation.

In 2019, I made a substantial presentation at IJET-30 in Cairns on the theme of how to break out of the second tier, which works for translation-brokering agencies. At the time, however, I didn’t realize how prescient it was to turn out to be, now that freelancing on the second tier is no longer viable for people who want to continue translating.

Nothing to See but a Performance

It’s rather comical on both sides of the recent kerfuffle about Australia’s performative banning of under 16-year-olds from having social media accounts.

There are a number of things that just don’t make sense.

(1) There is apparently no punishment for having an account if you’re under 16.

(2) The social media platform companies are ostensibly risking multimillion dollar fines for not complying with this law. It is pretty obvious that what will happen is that people like Zuckerberg will be called to testify somewhere and they’ll say “We spent all this money, trying to comply, so we’re doing our best.” Does anybody believe that there is actually a desire to lose all those customers, which means to lose all that behavioral information?

(3) As I input this note, there are countless young people making new anonymous social media accounts—backed up by new anonymous email accounts—in which they say they are 16 or older or somehow fake being 16 or older. There are reports of that already happening. There is a will to do that and they will find a way to do that.

There will also be a market for social media accounts that can be repurposed to get around this performative restriction.

(4) The vast majority of social media accounts are essentially anonymous to start with. I’ve never made a social media account where I had to prove my identity.

The platform owners don’t care. All they care about is your behavioral information, which they vacuum up and used to sell advertising, meaning they have no incentive to actually kill accounts or prevent accounts from being made by people under 16.

(5) Social media companies already use countless people in the third world to monitor for murderers, rapes, and other atrocities in posts on their platforms. Are those people going to be diverted to the task of verifying that account owners are 16 years or older?

Even if social media wanted to comply (they don’t) I can’t believe that people in developed economies are going to enlisted at reasonable salaries to do all this monitoring, which is a level of diligence on the part of tech bro billionaires that they have never shown in trying to figure out even who it is that has hold of currently active accounts, let alone their ages. It is a lawless land and that’s just fine with them because it’s a very profitable land.

(6) The banning of children under 16 from social media is purely performative and might actually serve as a diversion from concerns about what social media is doing to people 16 and older. In that sense, it could actually be welcomed by social media owners. They will fail at doing what would actually be necessary—because it’s inevitable that they fail—and then they’ll look like they’ve done their part, and the remaining social media users are still targets for all the evil things that go on in social media, including, but not unlimited to, behavior manipulation by the platform owners, deep fakes, and much worse.

More AI Snake Oil

In a recent BBC report of an interview with Google (Alphabet) boss Sundar Pichai, we see Pichai repeating the nonsense spewed by numerous AI tech bros in attempts to allay fears of AI disruption.

Pichai says that AI will also affect work as we know it, calling it “the most profound technology” humankind had worked on. Well, perhaps that part of his comments is correct.

“We will have to work through societal disruptions,” he said, adding that it would also “create new opportunities”.

One person’s manageable disruption is another’s total disastrous loss of earning power.

There are people who have been successful in a number of specific careers who will not be offered or be able to take those “new opportunities.” Many are already being deprived of work and income, by being replaced by AI. Opportunities will be provided to others, perhaps, but certain careers will simply disappear; translation is one of them. Change is coming much too fast for some groups to keep up. The notion that translation will continue as a career is clearly delusional.

“It will evolve and transition certain jobs, and people will need to adapt,” he said. Those who do adapt to AI “will do better”.

Transition? Adapt? What do translators transition to and how do they adapt? By accepting post-editing work at one-fifth the word rate (and certainly not anywhere near a compensating five-fold increase in throughput)? And that doesn’t even address the issue of mind-numbing post-editing work. Most translators will not be able to survive by adapting to AI or even adopting AI themselves, because they have been habitualized by their clients to working only for a client demographic one tier above them on the food chain, and that client demographic is currently using AI to replace them. Freelancers have arguably allowed themselves to be isolated from translation consumers that have not yet adopted AI. AI will be of no avail without clients that are not using AI, and that includes acting as the “human in the loop,” the snake oil sold by the major translation brokers that control most of the translation market.

“It doesn’t matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools.”

This could very well be true for some professions. As noted above, however, freelance translating is not one of them, as is already being demonstrated to be the case, with large numbers of translators trapped into non-translation functions that pay extremely poorly, if they even have that left as their clients replace them with AI.

The outlook is bleak. More and more translators are coming to realize that, but numerous translation organizations appear to hang onto the delusion that this storm can be ridden out; it cannot. When it passes, it will leave a barren wasteland in its path, with very few translators left standing.