Author: William Lise

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

Let’s get real.

Every day in every way it’s getting sillier and sillier to think that learning Japanese with the goal of earning a living by translating is a good strategy.

Universities are surely not teaching Japanese students aiming at translating for a living what’s waiting for them when they get out of school, because it’s not very much, and it’s very unlikely to be anything approaching what could be called translation. It would, naturally, not be in the interest of universities to turn off students with the grim truth.

Post-editing AI-generated translation—most of what “linguists” are being offered to do for peanuts—is as much translating as tightening bolts on a car before final delivery is “manufacturing cars.” And the idea that it will be faster and therefore compensate for the drastic reduction in rates is simply not informed by the reality. That reality is that translation sellers know they can get away with offering very low earning potential for post-editing, thanks to a ready and essentially captive labor supply of former translators with few other options and bills to pay.

Translators’ organizations appear to be at least tacitly going along with the delusion that things might get better for translators or at least won’t totally collapse, because “humans will always be needed” (loose bolts remain for low-paid labor to tighten).

The reality, however, is that things are already collapsing for large numbers of agency-dependent freelance translators.

People need to discard aspirational rationalizations and delusions, recognize what is actually happening, and act accordingly. And that does not realistically involve continuing to chase after a career that exists for only a tiny portion of extremely fortunate people. Freelance translating has essentially ended. Let’s get real about it.

Nothing to See but a Performance

It’s rather comical on both sides of the recent kerfuffle about Australia’s performative banning of under 16-year-olds from having social media accounts.

There are a number of things that just don’t make sense.

(1) There is apparently no punishment for having an account if you’re under 16.

(2) The social media platform companies are ostensibly risking multimillion dollar fines for not complying with this law. It is pretty obvious that what will happen is that people like Zuckerberg will be called to testify somewhere and they’ll say “We spent all this money, trying to comply, so we’re doing our best.” Does anybody believe that there is actually a desire to lose all those customers, which means to lose all that behavioral information?

(3) As I input this note, there are countless young people making new anonymous social media accounts—backed up by new anonymous email accounts—in which they say they are 16 or older or somehow fake being 16 or older. There are reports of that already happening. There is a will to do that and they will find a way to do that.

There will also be a market for social media accounts that can be repurposed to get around this performative restriction.

(4) The vast majority of social media accounts are essentially anonymous to start with. I’ve never made a social media account where I had to prove my identity.

The platform owners don’t care. All they care about is your behavioral information, which they vacuum up and used to sell advertising, meaning they have no incentive to actually kill accounts or prevent accounts from being made by people under 16.

(5) Social media companies already use countless people in the third world to monitor for murderers, rapes, and other atrocities in posts on their platforms. Are those people going to be diverted to the task of verifying that account owners are 16 years or older?

Even if social media wanted to comply (they don’t) I can’t believe that people in developed economies are going to enlisted at reasonable salaries to do all this monitoring, which is a level of diligence on the part of tech bro billionaires that they have never shown in trying to figure out even who it is that has hold of currently active accounts, let alone their ages. It is a lawless land and that’s just fine with them because it’s a very profitable land.

(6) The banning of children under 16 from social media is purely performative and might actually serve as a diversion from concerns about what social media is doing to people 16 and older. In that sense, it could actually be welcomed by social media owners. They will fail at doing what would actually be necessary—because it’s inevitable that they fail—and then they’ll look like they’ve done their part, and the remaining social media users are still targets for all the evil things that go on in social media, including, but not unlimited to, behavior manipulation by the platform owners, deep fakes, and much worse.

Thoughts on Work in Recent Years

Thinking back on my last few years of translation and interpreting work, I recall that I turned 73 during my largest-ever single interpreting assignment, and I turned 78 during my largest-ever single translation job. These assignments happened seven and two years ago, respectively.

The former was 35 consecutive calendar days of interpreting in a detention facility for a Japanese government agency in a high-profile case involving foreign executives of a company here, and the latter was 1200-plus pages of translation for a US military legal group in a distinctly low-profile case involving a US military person. Crime pays.

I’m not actively chasing new clients these days, but when one chases me, I give some thought to allowing them to catch me.