Author: William Lise

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

Denial, Delusion, Diversion, and Desperation

From everything I can see of posts and comments from translators on LinkedIn and elsewhere, I fully expect that great numbers freelance translators and their organizations will continue to deny, delude, and divert attention away from the impending demise of freelance translating as a realistic career.

I fully understand the pain involved in contemplating the end, but the end is here already. To deny it is simply delusional.

Almost all freelance translators are stuck in this position because they are unable to acquire translation-consuming clients. Most are stuck working for agencies that simply act as brokers for their services.

Translators who think they will attract or somehow acquire direct clients to replace agencies should go out and try it. It will become apparent to almost all translators that direct clients are out of their reach.

And the agencies freelancers have relied on are not going to come back. The belief that they’ll come back is a delusion. The agency translation work model has all but ended.

Only a very small number of freelancers will survive, because very few freelancers are capable of acquiring direct clients (later adopters of AI), which at this point, other than getting in-house work at a non-translation entity, is one of the few paths for survival, at least for a while, doing language-related work.

And translators need to stop telling themselves and others that post-editing AI output is the new task for translators and that it is translation. Post-editing is not translation, and it does not offer earning potential at anywhere near a level that would make it a realistic career, the mind-numbing work of that deadend activity aside.

People need to get real, set the pain aside, and think about what to do next.

Translation organizations try to save their members from the painful truth facing them.

The ITI in the UK just posted on LinkedIn a link to a report of a webinar participated in by translation academics and industry leaders, purporting to answer the question of “Is translation still a worthwhile profession to enter in the age of AI?”

The ITI response to the challenge presented by translation consumers bypassing professionals in favor of AI is to emphasize the hallmarks of professionalism, as exemplified by (quoted verbatim from the ITI report):

  • holding specialist knowledge
  • holding recognised credentials
  • adhering to a code of professional conduct
  • keeping skills up to date
  • exercising independent judgement
  • placing client and public interest first
  • taking responsibility for their work

These are all laudable tenets, but stating them does not provide an answer to the question of whether translation is still a worthwhile profession to enter.

The problem faced by almost all translators, and particularly by freelancers, is that even adhering to all of the above is totally insufficient to survive. The above list makes it look like these are the keys to survival. That is totally uninformed by the real world.

This approach speaks of an attitude that is held not just by the ITI but by other translation organizations as well, including Japan Association of Translators here in Japan.

Little or no attention is given to—and they arguably actively avoid—the real-world situation in which translation is not an academic or lofty professional activity, but rather a business. Freelance translators in particular, since they are almost all dependent upon translation-brokering agencies and must operate in a two-tier food chain, will find that the above tenets are totally inadequate, since they must also move away from agencies, which have historically proven and continue to demonstrate that they are moving away from human professionals.

Acquiring direct clients is a survival strategy, but is something that translation organizations appear to want to play down or totally ignore, perhaps because they correctly realize that such a strategy is out of reach for all but a small portion of their members.

That said, I strongly believe organizations should stop pretending that all you need to do is “be professional,” and start counseling members on more realistic strategies. Those strategies do not include continuing to believe that the future lies in working for translation agencies. That business model is nearing its end.

Desperation drives a lot of LinkedIn posts from the global south.

My LinkedIn feed is inundated with posts from people with whom I share no business or language interests. They are mostly from the Global South and mostly AI-generated slop, and the low value of the posts is disturbing.

Why is it that the majority of LinkedIn post mentioning Japan that are fed to me by Microsoft are from accounts of people who are not in Japan, including many in the Global South, who are very unlikely to ever be able to come to Japan?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need to spend a bit of time thinking about LinkedIn and the demographics of desperate LinkedIn users.

Many LinkedIn users in the global south will never have the opportunity to visit locations such as Japan, but post in the hope that AI-generated or even human-generated Japan-related slop will attract engagement and perhaps income. That is highly unlikely, but such is the LinkedIn world of desperation.