Accordingly, I have retired from the enterprise of writing for freelance translators, considering the stark realities that they are facing.
Tag: translation
A new level of desperation by a Global South Linkedin user: Using AI to automate the process of clicking on click work
These days many freelance translators, post-editors, and anything-they-can-getters have apparently taken to sitting in front of their computers, constantly refreshing numerous click-work sites in hopes of both clicking before someone else and offering a low enough rate to get whatever scraps fall off the click-work table.
Today while scrolling through LinkedIn posts, I was presented with a post from a fellow in Cameroon offering a bot to automate the process, so now you can more efficiently catch those scraps dropped from the click-work table. Brilliant, just brilliant.
Click-work dependency didn’t start recently, and now it appears to be the normal method of getting work for many people even not in the Global South who formerly actually made a living by doing translation.
Shameful and non-shameful use of AI
I don’t use AI when translating documents for clients, for the simply reason that I don’t need AI to translate, I don’t like the translations it produces, and I’m the translator I present to my client as the person who cares about and will execute the translations of their documents. Using AI would be a betrayal.
Translation-brokering agencies, which are well along in their replacement of human professionals with AI—and that leaves former translators with only extremely low-paid and mind-numbing post-editing work—are in a different situation.
The reason is simple. Almost all translation that is paid for by translation consumers is done by entities that are not themselves involved in executing translations, beyond purchasing the translations and then, if necessary, purchasing editing thereof before selling them. That is the case now, and it has been the case for many years, from long before humans found themselves being replaced by AI. Since entities that sell translation are only very rarely involved in doing translations, it makes sense for them to move away from expensive human professionals, and they are succeeding in that move.
That said, for a process or task that I do not purport to do myself or sell to clients as a practitioner, I am more willing to use AI. If you look in the upper-right corner of my company website pages, you will see a hamburger menu icon. I have manually written the HTML for my considerable number of webpages for many years, resisting adding such a feature, not understanding how to do it, either with or without JavaScript. I gave in the other day and used Claude.ai to build that feature into my website. It took less than three minutes to obtain the required patch of html markup and the associated JavaScript, required no cash outlay, and it gave me what I needed with just a plain-language prompt of about three lines describing what I wanted.
There is a putative environmental impact—it is much smaller, of course, than the impact resulting from building a fake video of a deceased celebrity or a dancing cat—but I am not at all ashamed I did that. That would not be the case if I were in the business of selling webpage designs.
Returning to translation, the translations I do are mine and will continue that way, as I continue to resist the mindless rush into a world where translators surrender to AI-using brokers and professionals of all sorts outsource not only their writing but also their thinking to a collection of software commands. That’s not my style, and I cannot see that changing anytime soon.