Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Delude much?

Because almost all freelance translators are dependent on agencies as sources of work, the destruction of freelance translating careers by AI is not a prediction, because it has already happened, but there are two misguided groups of people who delude or consciously pretend that things are going to be fine: Adaptists and adoptists. There is also a third group, which I want to call schadenfreude-seeking aspirationals, but I will deal with that delusion in another post.

The people promoting “adapting” to AI often don’t say what adapting might actually be. It is clear, however, that most of these people are just sugar-coating or mischaracterizing extremely low-paid AI post-editing, which is not only insultingly low-paid work, but also mind-numbing, and it is a dead-end task that won’t lead to translation work from any kind of client.

And then we’ve got the “adoptists,” who promote the use of AI by freelancers to do translations. If that helps you, fine, but do these people actually think that any but a tiny portion of freelancers will be able to acquire clients for their AI translation services, when the only clients they have been historically able to acquire are agencies that have essentially stopped ordering translation from humans? To think adopting under those conditions is either fully delusional or totally uniformed by the numerous obstacles that only a tiny number of freelancers can overcome.

Many translator don’t even have a grasp of what those obstacles are, having lived and worked for years locked on tier two of the translation business without any hope of reaching tier one or knowing how to get there. Some believe the self-proclaimed coaches who tell them they need to engage in “personal branding.” Well, perhaps, but from what I have seen, these coaches leave the difficult parts behind the smoke and mirrors. Bacj ub 2019, before many people, including me, even thought the end would arrive so soon, I discussed some survival solutions in my presentation at IJET-30 in Cairns. Even more needs to be said and can be said now, but few want to listen, and the advice is not usable by most freelancers, who are sadly locked on tier two, which these days is not populated by many freelancers who actually get to earn from translating.

It must be depressing to many freelancers to contemplate their demise, and also further depressing to contemplate the reasons, which underscore the futility for most of even trying to survive by translating.

For me personally, it is sad to watch many highly capable freelancers denying and deluding to avoid facing those depressing realities.

Some thoughts on foreign workers here in Japan

Much of the view of foreigners here can be attributed not just to social media, but also to the main news media. When you here ○×国籍の… (a … of XYZ nationality), because of being preconditioned by the frequency of such news in the major media, it is safe to think that you are going to hear a report of a crime. Where are the stories about the more common foreigners not doing things to get them in such news stories?

My experience with recent foreign workers here has been different.

The young woman who helped us change our smartphone plans recently was from Nepal. She handled the rather complex transaction in very good Japanese, as efficiently and competent as Japanese staff member could have been. The only clue that she was not 100% culturally native was when she referred to us as お父さん and お母さん. We thought that was cute and didn’t have a problem with it, even though she was a bit young to be even our daughter.

Language is a major problem for the majority of foreign workers. If your daily environment is mostly dealing with a compatriot intermediary or you don’t otherwise need Japanese to work—this is apparently the case with many foreign workers here—you will be less incentivized to learn Japanese.

Just some thoughts from this very non-recent arrival—50 years ago is not very recent, and cannot lay claim to being a “real” expat.

Taking care of 仁義

Around 1977, I was in a large cabaret on the west side of Yokohama station, the Hollywood, which subsequently morphed into a Yodobashi store.

It had a band and often featured previously well-known singers who were no longer a thing; 一節太郎, and the like. The Hollywood was sometimes used as the location of movie scenes. But I digress.

A young thug walked in, evidently heading to a table already occupied by others of his party. He made the serious mistake of passing by the table of someone he should’ve shown proper respect to, but ignored.

There was a kerfuffle that went on between two tables—I was one table away—and the ultimate resolution was that someone from the late-arriving thug’s table came to the offended thug’s table to make things right, doing something I had only ever seen in movies (仁義を切ったわけ), as the band played on.

If this had happened today, I imagine a bunch of jerks would take out their iPhones and take photos of it.