Nonsense on Steroids

From Google, upon being asked whether freelance translation is ending.

Freelance translation is not ending, but it is undergoing a massive transformation. While generative AI and machine translation (MT) have eliminated low-end, commodity translation work and depressed rates across many agencies, experts and experienced linguists remain in high demand. The market now requires professionals to shift from translating raw text to providing specialized, high-value services.

Huh? I guess I should not be surprised to see this self-serving Google AI overview when I asked it the rhetorical question of whether freelance translation is ending. Google is heavily into promoting AI, and it is best (for them) not to characterize AI as anything other than an uplifting technology that is reconstructing our world in a positive way.

What generative AI and machine translation have eliminated is definitely not limited to low-end, commodity translation work. Rather, it’s translation of subject matter that requires a human to understand it and be able to write for readers familiar with same.

Does this Google collection of software commands posing as intelligence “think” that patent translation is low-end, commodity translation? How about legal, business/finance, medical, and pharmaceutical? How about a 100-page document describing the operation of an MRI system?

These are the mainstream fields that the great majority of freelance JA-EN translators have made a good living from for decades. We are now told that they represent low-end, commodity translation. Well, yes, after the translation-brokering agencies reduce their evaluation of translation in those fields to peanuts because their AI system, followed by repair work done by desperate former translators will work for them and their clients, and it is indeed working.

“Experts and experienced linguists” are in high demand? Well, perhaps, but only because most are trapped in a captive labor pool that can go nowhere else to obtain gainful work, including competing with the AI translation broligarchs for direct clients, and are willing to work for a fraction of what they could have earned before having their lunch eaten by AI-using translation brokers. And those newly required services are claimed to be high-value, but they are being paid insultingly low, which reflects their true value as seen by the purchasers.

Being called a linguist is not going to pay any bills for mid-career translators who have lots of mid-career life expenses and had expected to be able to live without a financial threat from technology. The story doesn’t end, however, with Google’s off-the-mark take on the effect of AI on freelance translating.

It’s bad enough having places like Google feed you this nonsense. Organizations purporting to represent the interests of translation practitioners are falling in line, chanting the “new role” mantra and acting like people should just roll with the punch and take on those exciting new roles. That is simply irresponsible and contrary to their professed mission statements, but I guess these people need to pretend they and the organizations they run are still relevant, and to hell with the practitioner members who are seeing their relevance rapidly fading away.

Meeting Interpreting 101 Taught by a Clueless Client

One day I received an inquiry about interpreting in a meeting to be held between several foreigners and an undisclosed number of Japanese participants, regarding an undisclosed topic, and the failure to disclose turned out to be the deal-breaker.

When I asked the inquiring foreigner what the topic of the meeting was, he replied that I don’t need to know that. I tried to explain the reason the interpreter should know what the subject matter is beforehand, not the least of which is determining whether even to accept the assignment, but it fell on deaf ears—those ears apparently were positioned at either side of a brain that needed to work a bit harder on the problem of securing interpreting services.

In what appeared to be frustration at my having the temerity to ask what the meeting was going to be about, the clueless foreigner launched into Meeting Interpreting 101, describing to me what interpreting was.

He kindly explained to me that “We’ll speak in English, and you will say what we said in Japanese, and then the other side speaks Japanese, after which you say what they said in English.”

I was flabbergasted—people who know me will understand that my flabber is quite gasting-resistant—and told him that he needed to go elsewhere. Story over, or so I thought.

Just several days later, a female called to ask for an interpreter. It turned out to be the same clueless people. My guess is that they were having the same sort of responses from other interpreters they spoke to. Some people are ineducable.

Cringeworthy Court Interpreting

Years ago, I used to visit the Tokyo District Court to watch the work of other interpreters. I was there in the gallery watching a criminal case one day, in which the accused was a US marine who was charged with assaulting a customer at a bar—if I remember correctly, it was Gas Panic, often frequented by foreigners.

The interpreter stumbled numerous times, and one time she could not remember the expression for shin in English, which is where the victim was said to have been kicked by the accused. She tried to finesse it by saying the “front of the bottom part of the leg.”

I must have cringed visibly from the gallery, because when the session had finished, the judge, having gotten into the elevator with me, after verifying his suspicion that I was an interpreter, invited me into his office, where he asked if I was interested in being a court interpreter.

What ensued was an education about how court interpreters are paid in Japan. I believe a figure of something like 50,000 yen for a full day was mentioned. The problem, however, is that full days almost never occur, and you only get paid for the actual hours you’re in the courtroom interpreting, which could be an hour or two. There’s no minimum charge or compensation for travel and no compensation for preparation. That would bring the effective compensation down to a small fraction of what deposition interpreters normally bill, and an even smaller fraction of the amount that, ironically and atypically, I was paid by the special investigators (essentially the same organization as the courts) for interpreting in the slammer up in Kosuge back in 2018-19. I gave a non-committal response, but there was no chance of me becoming a court interpreter.

After this encounter, the government mentioned a plan to establish court interpreter qualifications, but I don’t know what happened to that plan.