There’s a FOMO frenzy over AI, and ITI is encouraging it.

It looks like ITI is revealing their mindset when they promote an online multimodule CPD course from a university that:

  • teaches and promotes to translators the use of AI in translation, and
  • costs GBP 375.

Does the ITI really think this is what it should be doing?

Are translators to be led to believe that AI is the solution to their problems?

More importantly and totally unrelated to AI use by translators, does the ITI have any plans to help its members learn how to find new clients when their AI-using agency translation clients are gone (for many, they are already gone)?
Hint: It’s not by telling new prospective clients that they are ITI members.

Either the ITI just has some unspoken reason to promote this costly CPD course or it is seriously out of touch with the real world of translation and the translation business faced by freelancers.

Appalling is too kind a word for this.

I naturally don’t use AI, but go ahead and use it if it helps. It won’t result in clients ordering translations, however, because that requires sales, and selling to the kind of clients freelancers facing an existential crisis need involves doing things above and beyond making posts on LinkedIn and taking courses on how to use AI.

Get real (again)!

The Internet and social media in particular, which essentially guarantee anonymity and prevents accountability, have pretty much destroyed trust. When the current torrent of AI-generated text and images is added to the picture, trust can safely be declared dead, and it shows no signs of being resurrected. 

This technology was exciting and promising at the outset some decades ago, but it has gone astray, led off the path by the promise to platform providers of fabulous wealth and by the arguably justified confidence that the ignorance and inaction of people sleeping at the wheel, including both legislators and user-victims, would protect their gold mine.

Given the poor prognosis for recovery, I think it’s time to retreat from the digital world and advance (back) into the real world, and the real world is not on your iPhone screen or computer display.

Get real!

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.
Long, long ago, I was sitting in an aircraft listening to a language I don’t work with anymore, having almost totally lost my speaking ability, while retaining some reading ability, in that language. I heard the following, spoken by someone in another aircraft.

[Я] выпустил шланг.

When I was growing up in the US I was exposed (linguistically, anyway) to the last word in that sentence (shlang) but only in its borrowed meaning in Yiddish slang as spoken in the US.

That meaning is generally understood (although frequently spelled differently) in the US across ethnic and language boundaries, and I was rather surprised that someone in a military aircraft would announce that he had let it out. I would’ve thought that he would have kept it to himself, so to speak.

I was young and inexperienced, and in spite of my high grades in Russian, I did not understand the borrowed sense of the word in Russian (hose). Before I realized what was being talked about, the revelation of its being let out caused me to chuckle.

A colleague sitting next to me in our aircraft didn’t realize what was going on; I was listening (it then occurred to me) to an air-to-air refueling exercise, and he was listening to something else.

And now back to regular programming.

It has already ended, and no amount of delusion or denial will help.

Executive Summary: Despite protests, delusion, and denial, freelance translating has effectively reached its end as a realistic career choice. People thinking about freelance translating should think again; those engaged in it already need to be ready to look elsewhere and soon, or be ready to retire.

I think that freelancers who think that AI might help them do translation might be correct, but it won’t rescue them from the AI tsunami that has hit their profession, because they won’t be able to receive translation work from the only clients (agencies) that most freelancers can acquire. Even translation consumers will go away; it will just take them a bit longer.

Freelancers who constantly post aspirational predictions that humans will always be needed are, at best, only partially correct, because they will be needed, not to do translation, but only for extremely low-paid repair work on AI output. Translation organizations, faced with loss of relevance, are also guilty of promoting this “AI will not replace us” delusion, without mentioning that it is necessary to have clients. AI is already well along in the process of replacing their members as translators.

There are translators who counter by positing that they can make enough doing post-editing. They either

  • were making so little doing translation that being paid peanuts to post-edit is enough, or
  • it hasn’t occurred to them—or is too painful to contemplate—that the growing cohort of out-of-work translators will drive post-editing rates down to an even lower rate than they are at present.

Confident in the knowledge that large numbers of desperate translators will be available as post-editing labor, agencies have no obligation, no inclination, and—more significantly—no business need to allow translators to earn what they formerly able to earn. The rates are already low, for both the reduced amount of remaning translation work and the post-editing that is replacing that work, and the rates continue to drop.

If agencies did have such an obligation, there would be no reason to adopt AI in the first place. For agencies, translation is a business, not a charitable enterprise aimed at rescuing freelancers who have lost their earning ability.

And we also have the totally delusional freelancers who claim that clients (theirs are almost all translation-brokering agencies) will come back to them when they see how bad AI translation is. This optimism is totally unwarranted, regardless of how many related fairytales are posted online.

Freelance translation for agencies has reached the end of the road, and I would never advise someone to learn a foreign language with the aim of building a career as a freelance translator. I couldn’t be so deceptive (or so stupid).

Because freelancing is not the only thing that is facing demise, I have preserved some of my writings that have disappeared from the JAT website on my parent website.

Surprise! ChatGPT thinks it knows me.

I asked ChatGPT who William Lise is, and it came back with this in just a few seconds.

It believed everything I say about myself on my own website. Good for ChatGPT. It slipped up, however, by including, ostensibly as a photo of me, a photo of a guy who died in New Zealand a few years ago. Nice try. I am still around. A translator in Austria, Michael Bailey, helped me with this, probably by using image search.

LISE, Steven William