Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

There are two opposing views of AI in translation, but neither of them informs decisions that need to be made by freelancers.

[I wrote this almost precisely as presented here for JAT’s Translator Perspectives (2024), and much of it remains valid, although the situation for freelance translators has gotten much worse since then, and the end is basically on the very near horizon.]

There is a growing polarization between AI deniers claiming that AI is not—and will never be—good enough and AI “adoptionists” suggesting that translators should adopt AI. Both positions have a grain of truth, but because both ignore the reality that translation is a business, neither view serves to inform useful decisions that must be made by translators.

AI deniers need to realize that, although there are numerous professional translators who are better than AI, most of the commercial and technical JA-EN translation work that has for decades been successfully sold to and accepted by clients in the real world has been done by humans who now cannot compete with AI, which has largely replaced them for the task of translation.

To be fair to AI adoptionists, some translators might benefit from using AI, but adoptionists generally avoid the issue of where they will find clients who will purchase their AI-created translations when almost all their clients (agencies) are using AI themselves.

AI has changed the structure of the translation business. By agencies adopting AI, the model of registering with agencies and sitting back and waiting for translation work is crumbling. It has already crumbled for numerous capable translators I know and who are no longer in translation.

Ironically, the result of AI technology is that some of the human skills and activities that other, even less-sophisticated technologies obviated decades ago are now again important, much to the dismay of translators sitting at their computers waiting for work. In a sense, the survival rules and requirements are reverting to a time before technology made things so convenient for translators.

What is a translator to do? For many, the answer to that depends greatly on age, experience, and personal decisions that might have been made decades ago.

The prognosis for most translators who started out translating a decade or two ago is not bright. Access to clients still not using AI requires skills and activities many of them probably think are just so 1990.

Meeting non-translation people and building networks is more important now. That is not easy for translators living at a distance from translation consumers and an activity not attractive to many translators.

Specialization that is convincing to clients who understand the subject matter themselves is much more important now. When your contact was a project manager at an agency, that wasn’t important. Google is not your friend, however, if you need to meet a client knowledgeable in the subject matter face-to-face, and that need will arise, particularly for translators in Japan. Having a life before translation is valuable, but time travel has not yet been invented; and you just cannot go back and start over.

For NES translators in Japan, unless you can acquire some of the relatively rare anglophone clients, sales-ready spoken Japanese is pretty much essential. My observations tell me that few translators who have been here for a decade or longer and have not yet acquired that level of spoken Japanese will find it easy; for many, it will be unreachable.

For beginners, the outlook is somewhat brighter, but some former common-sense expectations are no longer valid. Just learning Japanese and becoming a good translator will not assure you of a successful career doing translation.

Early building of human networks is important. Acquisition of field-specific expertise is very important, and one way to achieve that is to take a non-translation job in your proposed field of specialization; again, it’s having a life before translation. The particular way I did it is neither something I recommend nor something others should aspire to imitate, but I described it in an article in my parent website.

Barking up the Wrong Curmudgeon

[The note was deleted from my Facebook account, for reasons I have described amply elsewhere.]

Meta ironically provides its user-victims with tools that enable verification that their posts are being shadow-banned as retribution for content that does not “align”—sorry for using that nausea-inducing newspeak term—with the Meta business model. I have tested this a number of times and have seen it play out, and it continues. Perhaps that behavior shouldn’t be surprising for a platform owned and operated by a serial-lying humanoid who prioritizes accumulation of wealth and control of his willing victims, all of whom have agreed—some unknowingly—to have him vacuum up their souls for commercial and other use by unknown and unknowable actors. And then said humanoid has the chutzpah to ask his victims to “verify” themselves on a platform in which users risk victimization by countless anonymous entities. With me, he is barking up the wrong curmudgeon.

Social media: Authenticity is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and now trust has definitively slipped away.

Not that there was much trust to be lost, but it becomes clearer every day that nothing social media platforms and their broligarch owners do is worthy of trust. To someone who has over the years and still makes his living dealing in the real world, where accountability comes with the territory, this trend turns social media into a very disturbing foreign land.

They make agreeing to ongoing vacuuming up of personal information, including but not limited to behavioral data, a condition of use, and billions of people seem fine with that, to satisfy their social media addiction and FOMO. I would rather pay and be free from surveillance and manipulation by the platform owners, but that is not an option.

And it doesn’t by any means end with what people actively allow the owners to do to them in order to use the platform.

The platform owners accumulate wealth by allowing and encouraging users to engage in unlawful, unauthorized publishing of vast amounts of copyrighted image and video content owned by others. The incorrectly understood acceptability of such unlawful publishing is premised on the convenient misunderstanding that publicly accessible and public domain are the same. They are not.

The platform owners also reward the creation of “content” that is at best worthless garbage designed to evoke engagement that earns ad income for the users and also puts money in the bank accounts of the slimeballs that run the platforms. Recently, that content includes huge amounts of AI-generated dreck, including countless deepfake invitations of viewers to crime scenes as the victim. And the platforms shadow-ban content that does not “align” with their business model of theft and engagement harvesting at any moral cost.

Social media companies operate with a business model in which both surveillance and manipulation of users and unlawful publishing by users of IP they don’t own are essential enabling activities.

The owner of Meta is a serial liar with no semblance of a conscience, and his unvoiced hope that he will never be regulated will probably be fulfilled. Orders to pay huge sums of money resulting from civil litigation are just a cost of doing business. And so it goes.