“Trapped doing basic translation work while the market moves toward higher-value role?”
The ATA amazingly actually wrote this in the lead-in to an ad for a seminar by a “certified” post-editor and “transcreator.”
The ATA, in their “wisdom” and desperation, are positioning post-editing of AI output as “higher-value roles.”
Rather than disingenuously characterizing dirt-cheap post-editing as high-value work, they should take a more honest look at where things are, and counsel their members on the next step.
The next step for a few of them will be trying to acquire clients who do not yet use AI yet to replace them, as their agency clients have essentially stopped ordering translation from freelancers. Because that almost certainly means direct clients, most will fail, as they are not able to break from their dependence on translation-brokering agencies.
But for many of the less-courageous freelancers, it will mean I move out of translation into something entirely different or biting the bullet and drastically downsizing their earning expectations.
The above stance of ATA is nothing but a demonstration of their total betrayal of the professional interests of translators.
Do they have any idea what people were translating before AI arrived? It certainly wasn’t anything that could be fairly characterized as “basic translation,” and people were not being “trapped” in it. Rather, they were making good livings by doing that “basic translation.” That has already gone away, thanks to a sufficient captive labor supply of dirt-cheap post-editors. Don’t blame AI, blame the two-tiered structure of the translation business. The demise of freelancing was in the cards way before even brokers realized it.
The ATA and other organizations cannot turn things around, but they need to cut the bullshit and make some tough decisions. ATA will probably continue to exist because of the sociolinguistic demographics in the US (and the somewhat unjustified reliance of translation brokers on ATA certification), but ATA has already effectively abandoned freelance translators.
Other organizations, including but not limited to ITI, are moving in the same direction. Translators need to decide in what direction they should move.
