Author: William Lise

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

Falacious arguments are used to support delusions of human translator survival.

Even as AI translation continues to make progress in replacing countless Japanese-to-English translators, two falacious arguments continue to be used to support the mistaken prediction that AI won’t replace professional human translators.

  • Translation by AI cannot capture cultural nuance and emotion.

This is arguably true, but for only a tiny portion of translation that is paid for. Only a very small portion of the translation that is paid for has anything to do with culture or emotion. In contrast to the relatively much smaller fields such as literature, games, other entertainment, or marketing, translation in fields such as finance, business, technical, legal, patent, and the like, which have supported the livelihoods of the overwhelming majority of Japanese-to-English translators do not involve culture. There’s just not much cultural nuance or emotion in sight in most of the mainstream translation fields, which can be handled satisfactorily—the client decides what is satisfactory—by AI combined with low-paid post editing.

  • Mistranslation will result in injuries, deaths, and litigation.

However attractive such outcomes might seem to translators hoping for a schadenfreude hit, these warnings, almost always presented in the abstract without factual basis, are not supported by verifiable incidents. These warnings of incredible risks need credible facts to support them. Those facts haven’t been forthcoming.

No amount of chanting of the cultural-nuance mantra or the deaths-and-litigation mantra will change what has already progressed in translation to an extent not much talked about, perhaps because the people affected are gone.

The replacement of professional human translators by AI with post-editing is well underway and coming soon to your optimistic neighborhood.

What is it with the Microsoft thugs that own and run LinkedIn?

I trashed my account of about five years standing in October and LinkedIn sent me a “we’re sorry to see you go” email. Fine. I don’t need any emails from them, so I trashed the email alias on my company server that I had used as a contact address for that LinkedIn account.

Just today, probably seeing that email to the above-noted address is bouncing, these cyberlouts sent me a “You’re on a roll on LinkedIn” (subject line) email at a gmail address (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea big fucking culpa) I had once used as an address for LinkedIn things with an account I haven’t had for ten years, with a notification bell and number-of-notifications count, trying to get me to sign in (and revive?) the account.

If you click on it, a page pops us trying to get me to sign into that long-gone LinkedIn account.

To ad insult to injury, the email telling me that I’m “on a roll” itself has two introductions to a cumstain trying to sell akiya, of all things, to unsuspecting foreigners, intended targets surely including, but not limited to, self-proclaimed digital nomad hipsters who look forward to interacting with their peers, not realizing that it will be very difficult to find peers in Hachinohe or some other venue that has these lovely properties. Let the nomad beware. But I digress.

I am not thrilled, not excited, and not honored to get this shit sent to me, to borrow the phony formulaic openers self-proclaimed “founders” on LinkedIn often open with.

They have an Unsubscribe link to click on, but I suspect that clicking on it would just notify LinkedIn that there’s “somebody home.” I’ll let this sit for a while. The annoying thing is that this is not an alias address that can be conveniently trashed, but any email from them can be automatically trashed, and I will think of other ways they should be rewarded.

It’s good that the distance of Cyberspace provides the Microsoft people avoidance of accountability and protection from people who would do them physical harm.

Post-editing is not translation.

[I have retired from efforts to help translators survive (it’s basically a fruitless activity), and I’ve noted the reasons elsewhere. Idiocy is being peddled as hope, and I won’t be a part of it.]

I notice that numerous translation sellers offering “MTPE work” on their click-work platforms or on commercially provided reverse-auction platforms such as ProZ are attempting to categorize post-editing as “translation” or saying they’re looking for translators. This was sometimes the case on the JAT Job Board, but that might have been because editing or post-editing cannot be selected when you post a job and, to be fair, some said “Translation (MTPE),” but that is still incorrect, considering the task being described and the payment being assumed acceptable.

This looks like just the next step in agencies grooming their essentially captive labor supply to accept the new order.

Although I’ve never done or been asked to do post-editing of machine-translated output, I hear many people say it requires the skill of a translator. I can certainly believe that, and that might be even more the case recently, given the deceptively human-like English quality produced by AI.

As a task, however, post-editing is not translation, and it doesn’t come with an earning potential anywhere near what performing the task of translation provided to freelancers in the past.

Post-editing is no more translation than editing and rewriting Japanese-to-English translations decades ago was translation. Many people doing it then, however, aspired to become translators who actually get to do translation and be paid for translation, and many did achieve that goal. That will not be the case with the vast majority of people who do post-editing now, either to survive mid-career or because they think it’s a stepping stone to translation. It is not, and for most translators post-editing is at best a survival job for people not in a position to reinvent themselves.

The places needing post-editing realize they don’t need to provide much earning potential because of the continued availability of a captive labor supply with not many options. If they did need to provide anywhere near the earning potential of the past, there would be not much reason for them to adopt AI.

Because of the age demographics of the translator population, this situation should continue for at least a decade or two; after that, it’s difficult to tell where things will go, but it won’t matter to mid-career translators currently facing this situation, because for them the possibility of translating for a living will have ended.

All of that uncomfortable reality aside, I wish people would stop calling post-editing of MT/AI output translation, and also wish they would realize that calling a post-editor or even a translator a “linguist” has never put money in their bank account, and that most translators would rather have the money and the job satisfaction than the bloated title.