Wishful Thinking and Delusions

I keep seeing wishfully thinking freelance translators saying that clients will come back to them when they realize how bad AI translations are. My observations of the real world are quite different.

  • As agency clients of freelancers migrate to using AI themselves to do translations extremely cheaply and quickly for their clients, they will not be returning to freelancers for translation, and freelancers will either be driven out of translating for a living or accept drastically reduced expectations of earnings.
  • If translation consumers use agencies that employ AI to do translation for them extremely cheaply and quickly (they have already started), they will not return to or engage with agencies still using professional translators, and those professional-using agencies will no longer be around to support the livelihoods of professional translators.

Both the above are clearly already in progress in the translation industry, and it is clearly a translation industry.

Quality is not an issue, because quality is good enough when it is cheap enough and fast enough. Once quality expections are lowered, they will resist being restored to previous levels.

If you avoid wishful thinking and delusions about where things are going in the near future—and where they currently are for many practitioners—the picture comes into focus.

Tough words, perhaps, but life’s tough, and then they expect you to post-edit.

The Impossibly Dreamy Mission Statement

[Originally posted to LinkedIn on January 29, 2025]

As part of a continuing demonstration of one of their mission statement items that they cannot fulfill, a certain translators’ organization in Japan has a job board on its website where people needing translation or interpreting can post jobs.

A peek at the board today revealed a rather disturbing picture of where the industry is and where that organization is in terms of its lack of clout in reaching people who need language services and are willing to pay for them.

  • An Indian agency looking for editing of papers written in English by Japanese ESL academics.
  • AI training (two different ads by the same company)
  • Fixed monthly income of ¥300,000 for a Japanese native speaker to work doing interpreting of online meetings and writing reports.
  • Post-editing of videos that have been AI-translated.
  • A well-known Japanese company looking for a Japanese native to act as a translator into Japanese and, amazingly, also as an editor of translations into English.

The above is very representative of what has come to be seen on that job board for quite some time now.

While said translators’ organization is certainly not responsible for, and couldn’t vet these ads by other entities on its website, the above gives no evidence of the group’s clout with—and visibility to—entities needing services that have provided work to most of the Japanese-to-English translators who have supported the translation industry for decades. Mainstream translators are on their way out, as is the above-noted group.

It’s ending, folks. Well, more precisely, it has ended already, for translators, and also for this translators’ organization, which has long had a mission statement made up of bloated goals, most of which could never be achieved. That was true when I was the President of the group, and it is still true.

The group lost a significant portion of its membership in recent years, and needs to come to grips with that reality and take the appropriate action, which is to not continue to act like a mover and a shaker in translation. It is not, never was, and never will be.

At best, it is a group that occasionally holds enjoyable social events—albeit promoted as being something quite different—but it has traditionally posed as a group with much more influence than it could ever achieve.

It never had the power improve the status of translators (except among translators, which means little), and should stop acting like it does. It’s ending, as sure as the sun rises in the east.

Chickens are not egg collaborators.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 28, 2025]

Freelance translators need to stop “collaborating.”

A translator who sells a translation to a translation-brokering agency is no more “collaborating” with the agency (and the agency with them) than a chicken is collaborating with a supermarket when its eggs are sold to the supermarket for resale.

The supermarket has no chickens themselves and nobody at the supermarket is capable of laying eggs. Added to that is their lack of ability to improve the quality of eggs they purchase for resale and we have an airtight case against the use of the word collaboration for what goes on in the egg business and in the translation business.

In the brokered translation business as well, the broker’s lack of translation ability and frequent lack of ability even to judge and fix quality problems without also outsourcing those tasks both are evidence of the erroneous use of collaboration to describe what is happening.

The feel-good term collaboration has been adopted by many translators from the narrative used by agencies in the hope that the translators from whom they purchase translations for resale will erroneously think that they are equals. They are not, because they don’t have translation consumer clients, which are going to be an important survival strategy for some translators.

Many others choose to believe the unwarranted optimism of thinking that AI won’t replace them, but most will need to sit and post-edit until they are totally replaced. Some have already been replaced.

The first step in regaining your agency is to stop sounding like you are collaborating with agencies, because you are not.

It might be helpful to look at the etymology of the term collaboration.

After freelancers graduate from collaborating, they might consider distancing themselves from being “linguists” that accept “projects,” two more terms in the broker narrative that are not heard from direct clients, which is where the few translators who will survive need to focus.

One algorithm leads to another.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 16, 2025]

Disclaimer: I don’t have a LinkedIn account to find clients or look for a job, since my client demographic is essentially absent from LinkedIn, and I am not on LinkedIn looking for a job.

Now, with that out of the way:

The often-heard claim that LinkedIn is a business-related platform is delusional if we are talking about people seeking work.

There are people looking for employment on LinkedIn, but all that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is doing is using their algorithm to give users the opportunity to face yet other algorithms, operated by what they think are potential employers.

They will need first to game the Microsoft LinkedIn algorithm and then will further need to game a hiring algorithm to even get an interview, which apparently is a rare occurrence.

Those games are generally meaningless, and desperation and delusion are the only reasons many people hang onto LinkedIn, which is demonstrably just another social media platform, owned and run by Microsoft for much the same reasons Zuckerberg owns and runs Facebook and the reasons Musk owns and runs X. And we know those reasons, don’t we? Enough said.

Neurodivergent Salute?

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 15, 2025]

Microsoft shadow-banned this post on its LinkedIn platform. I wonder if that is just a demonstration that Microsoft joins the ranks of Trump-worshiping sycophants, or maybe the way to get a post noticed is to start it off by saying you’re thrilled, excited, honored, or afflicted with some other phony emotion. Anyway:

I see some Musk apologists saying that his two nazi salutes at a Trump event were just him being provocative.

That’s like someone holding a real gun up against your head and having it be ok because someone else explained later that it was unloaded and that the gun holder was just trying to be provocative.

Others blamed it on Musk being neurodivergent, but I wonder whether the US needs a neurodivergent shadow POTUS.