I have written enough about the plight of freelance translators in the face of their work disappearing because of their dependence on agencies that are using AI. Many delusional freelancers clearly incapable of surviving continue to claim that AI will not replace them. No more will come from me on this.
Tag: translation
The Abnormal Requirements Many Freelancers Accept
I have written enough about the plight of freelance translators in the face of their work disappearing because of their dependence on agencies that are using AI. Many delusional freelancers clearly incapable of surviving continue to claim that AI will not replace them. No more will come from me on this.
AI Translation: Uncaring Emulation
I welcome entities that create documents using a collection of software commands known as an AI to order translations of those documents from a “colleague AI.” Those documents don’t deserve less, but they don’t deserve more.
Most entities, however, have sentient humans write things that need to be translated. Their translation deserves the skill and care that only human professionals can provide.
AI translation merely emulates human skill—sometimes not very well—by emulating the behavior of a human. To do that, AI doesn’t need to understand anything, and it doesn’t understand anything; it just emulates understanding.
The most serious flaw of AI translation, however, is that, when dealing with human clients needing translation, it is not capable of caring.
Uncaring emulation. Don’t you and your documents deserve better?
Please, Microsoft!
Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.
With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.
The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.
There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.
Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.
The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.
Desperate and Clueless Spaghetti
Two plates of spaghetti were thrown against my wall today. They were of different flavors but essentially demonstrated the same phenomena of desperation and cluelessness. Neither had a chance of sticking.
This morning, I received two emails at an email address that was formerly listed on the US Embassy website in harvestable form. I have since changed that to just my URL, but it’s been harvested before and anyone can go to directly to my business website to read from the graphic of the email address if they really want it. Two people today really wanted it.
One was a real estate broker wanting to sell me on “unlisted” condominium for about USD 1.7 million.
It was, of course, a non-personalized, shotgunned cold-call email.
Several minutes after that I received an email from a translator in Europe—a place on the Balkan peninsula to be a bit more specific—offering translation services in a variety of European language directions at about EU 0.027 per word.
Amazingly, his selling point was that he uses Trados, and his CV indicates that he does everything. Well, I don’t mean that he claims to “do everything,” but rather that he lists the fields he can do, and it’s, basically, everything, in a large word cloud of totally unrelated fields.
Yes, desperation and cluelessness are the underlying themes in the emails that made it through my server-based spam filtering today.