Facing Reality

At the risk of accusations of having gone over to the dark side, I need to say that translators should accept the reality that the Japanese-to-English translation work that has supplied livelihoods to the great majority of freelance translators is now being handled quite satisfactorily (as determined by the paying clients, of course, not translators) by AI translation combined with editing done by former translators at very low rates.

The resulting cost is just a fraction of what it used to be, and this business model will succeed for at least a decade or two as is, with the help of currently idle translators, because a sufficient number thereof have no other career paths, but still have bills to pay.

Even after that, of course, there will be a continuing influx of Japanophilic language learners who are not aware of the real world of translation before they reach that real world and might not accept the reality of it even after they arrive there. That labor supply will continue to enable the above-noted business model. There won’t be a return to the old paradigm.

But even before the Japanophilic beginners take over post-editing from the dwindling supply of professional translators formerly working in mainstream demand fields, many translation consumers will themselves be doing AI translation and editing in-house.

That next stage of the transformation is already underway, as numerous translators continue to believe that things will work out, claimng that humans will always be needed to provide “cultural nuances.” The reality, however, is that only a tiny portion of translation that is paid for has anything to do with culture, and the parts that do can be fixed by very low-paid post-editors, at this stage meaning former translators who have no choice but to bite the low-paid post-editing bullet.

Denials, delusions, and occasional counter-indicative success stories aside, an evidence-based evaluation of where things actually already are points to exactly the above picture. The evidence?

  • Specific known translators forced to leave;
  • laughable rates paid to be the “human in the loop;”
  • the major translation sellers that control most clients and countless new translation-selling startups offering “human-in-the-loop” AI translation as their main service;
  • a paucity of translation work offered on even sleazy click-work reverse-auction platforms, which are now filled with very low-paid post-editing work;
  • no evidence of either a return to human professionals or dire AI translation-caused consequences, other than unverifiable anecdotes and aspirational, wishful-thinking predictions; and
  • a significant reduction and demographic transformation of the membership of the formerly most active group of JA/EN translation practitioners in Japan.

And there’s much more evidence from the real world, divorced from the aspirational predictions of survival made by people who hang out at the Denial & Delusion Café.

The above is not a pretty picture, but it is real, and you don’t have to wait for it to come to your neighborhood; it’s at your doorstep, if it’s not already in your kitchen eating your lunch.

Let’s get real.

Every day in every way it’s getting sillier and sillier to think that learning Japanese with the goal of earning a living by translating is a good strategy.

Universities are surely not teaching Japanese students aiming at translating for a living what’s waiting for them when they get out of school, because it’s not very much, and it’s very unlikely to be anything approaching what could be called translation. It would, naturally, not be in the interest of universities to turn off students with the grim truth.

Post-editing AI-generated translation—most of what “linguists” are being offered to do for peanuts—is as much translating as tightening bolts on a car before final delivery is “manufacturing cars.” And the idea that it will be faster and therefore compensate for the drastic reduction in rates is simply not informed by the reality. That reality is that translation sellers know they can get away with offering very low earning potential for post-editing, thanks to a ready and essentially captive labor supply of former translators with few other options and bills to pay.

Translators’ organizations appear to be at least tacitly going along with the delusion that things might get better for translators or at least won’t totally collapse, because “humans will always be needed” (loose bolts remain for low-paid labor to tighten).

The reality, however, is that things are already collapsing for large numbers of agency-dependent freelance translators.

People need to discard aspirational rationalizations and delusions, recognize what is actually happening, and act accordingly. And that does not realistically involve continuing to chase after a career that exists for only a tiny portion of extremely fortunate people. Freelance translating has essentially ended. Let’s get real about it.

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.