Author: William Lise

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

Not with a bang but a whimper: Relevance is slipping away from translation organizations.

I have written in more detail about the rather bleak output for freelancers elsewhere, but here are a few disturbing observations of what translation organizations are doing lately.

A number of major translation organizations that say they support and look out for the interests of translators—the ones I have in mind are located on three continents are—to varying degrees, but all clearly to a considerable extent—promoting non-productive belief in delusions by their members.

  • They allow and even encourage freelancer members to think that adopting AI themselves is a strategy for survival, carefully avoiding mention that the use of AI won’t attract clients for freelancers as their agency clients replace them with AI, and that only a very small number of freelancers are able to acquire clients other than agencies, which are well on their way out as purchasers of translation from freelancers. Some of the organizations, amazingly, have even taken to running or sponsoring events that sell AI-related products, teach AI use, or (more surprisingly) discuss post-editing.
  • They either themselves fail to recognize or are afraid that their members will recognize that it is not possible to earn a realistic living by doing the non-translation task of post-editing AI output.
  • They continue to promote the idea that human translators will always be needed (correct, of course), but fail to mention (or fear that their members will themselves realize) that, yes, human translators will always be needed, but only 5 to 10 percent of the current population of freelancers will be needed, and that the net number of actually working translators—post-editing is not translation—will reach that level in the very near future.

The above-noted behavior by translation organizations is uniformed at best and arguably irresponsible. It masks unspoken and unspeakable distress, but also surely is aimed at preserving the relevance of the organizations and of the people running them, in spite of most of their members seeing their own relevance slip away at a pace that defies their efforts to survive.

It is time for translation organizations to get real, face what is happening, and level with their members, rather than feeding them comfortable-sounding pap. If they cannot do that, they should think about other potential trajectories for the organizations, the most suitable one at this point being one that reduces the yearly dues needed to be paid by freelancers to organizations to zero.

Some Quite Unrelated Things I Have Learned Recently

  • 茱萸沢 is read Gumizawa. It’s a place in Gotemba that I encountered in an interpreting assignment this past week.
  • Drexel University in Philadelphia can find the diploma of a person who graduated more than a half-century ago, didn’t have a record of his student number (why would he?), and just told them his name, date of birth, approximate graduation date, and major. They found it, and the diploma—I don’t need something in a frame, but putting it in a frame is probably how they justify charging USD 150)—is arriving next week in a package that UPS said is 2 lbs, according to the notification I received today.

Things I learned last month:

  • I am not a bastard (at least in one sense of the word), attested to by the marriage certificate of my long-departed parents obtained from my hometown.
  • The purported Japanese name of Defense Language Institute in Monterey (at least as purported on a Japanese-language Wikipedia page about that school) is アメリカ国防総省語学学校. Why the Japanese turn language into linguistics is beyond me. I guess it sounds more impressive. I don’t recall learning any “linguistics” there in the 1960s, but rather the language spoken in the country that was forced to change its name but not much else a few decades after I graduated.

The classroom time at DLI was more than 1500 hours. That’s equivalent to numerous years in a university language program. Although I had extremely good grades, I managed to lose almost all my speaking ability in that language quite quickly, but that is totally unrelated to the translation and interpreting services I currently provide.

Three isn’t just an odd number. It’s the only integer between two and four.

In a contrived post about Shibusawa Eiichi on a certain platform not known for user authenticity:

Shibusawa wasn’t just an entrepreneur. He was a system builder.

…

He didn’t try to dominate one industry. He helped create all of them.

…

Japan’s modernization did not happen by accident. It was intentional.

…

[As the reason why he’s on the 10,000-yen note] Not because he was the richest man in Japan, but because he made it possible for others to create wealth.

Wow, that’s four of these AI-smelling constructions in a single post.

Does the person who wrote this using AI realize what it looks like? I doubt it. He identifies as a… drumroll… founder.

Enough said, and I doubt that you even need be told by me where the above was posted—everybody’s favorite hyper-curated phony persona promotion platform.