Author: William Lise

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

A Non-Crisis

There has been a kerfuffle recently in Japan surrounding a term that can be translated as existential crisis. It revolved around the newly elected PM’s mentioning that an attack by China on Taiwan could be taken to be an existential crisis, apparently for Japan, although that was not explicitly stated. This led me to think about something closer to the lives of translators that could be called an existential non-crisis.

Some translators might think that the appearance of AI has created an existential crisis for human translators. I disagree, because the use of the term crisis implies a possibility of surviving the crisis. For almost all freelance translators—and arguably many translation companies, although a bit later—survival as a translation provider isn’t in the cards.

It is time for both translators and their organizations to stop pretending—either by studied silence or by active denial and diversionary handwaving—that human translators are not already being replaced by AI on a devastating scale or won’t shortly be almost totally eliminated from the translation process step.

It is also time to realize that the essential and immutable enabling condition for the demise of human translators by AI use is the two-tier brokered structure of freelance translating, and that this condition was satisfied decades before AI appeared. That structure welcomed and fostered a population of freelancers who are willing to be isolated from translation consumers—some even welcomed that isolation—and who are incapable of surviving when the only client demographic available to most of them decides to replace them with AI.

Continuing the pretense of resilience in the face of the AI transformation might feel good (or at least might feel less painful than the truth), but it won’t change things.

Let’s get real and look at the real future, which will be radically different from what most translators imagined when they started translating. For most current freelance translators, that future won’t involve translating.

Are translators’ organizations giving this any thought? It’s hard to tell. One organization I am familiar with is basically silent on this situation. They hold occasional events on topics of interest to a small group of translators in a limited subject-matter domain, but they appear to have lost relevance to many members, judging from their significant loss of members, starting in 2016, long before the pandemic, which has sometimes been cited as the cause of the drop in membership.

I placed this post here because I suspected that, placed somewhere else, it would evoke serious pushback, denial, and even anger from the very people who will shortly be—or already are—ex-translators. Pushback, denial, and anger won’t change things.

Entitlement and Linguistic Imperialism of Foreigners Wanting to Come to Japan

My recent (but now terminated) participation on LinkedIn provided me a glimpse into how some foreigners—particularly foreigners who are having language-related employment problems in Japan or who want to come here to work but haven’t yet made it—view Japan and its “language problem.”

A complaint I often hear is that it is unfair for Japanese companies to require foreign employees to be Japanese capable. Some foreigners cite the requirement to pass a Japanese language proficiency test as being discriminatory. After all, they are highly educated, speak English, and have extremely valuable technical skills that don’t require Japanese ability, right?

I am not talking about farm or factory workers brokered into Japan from Asia, but rather people seeking work in jobs that call for a high level of education and skill; jobs such as programmer, but physically in a Japanese company, not on a farm in Tochigi or a factory in Aichi.

To my ears, the above type of comment is evidence of both entitlement and linguistic imperialism.

Where did these people get the notion that Japanese companies are obligated to treat them any differently from other employees?

I have spent a few years in Japan (about 50, actually), have had professional interaction with hundreds of companies, and have yet to encounter a Japanese company that operates in English here, or that would consider a foreign employee in Japan incapable of communicating in Japanese to be a full member of their team.

Surprise! The language of Japan is Japanese, and almost everybody here, including me, thinks that’s just fine.

The people voicing displeasure at the language requirement would, as employees, be required to interact on a daily basis with Japanese employees, most of whom are not proficient in English, and that needs to be done in Japanese. Interacting with other employees is part of the job. Without Japanese, a foreigner will not be fully functional.

These disgruntled foreigners need to remember that Japanese companies are made not of computer programs, databases, and hardware, but of carbon-based humans who communicate in Japanese. I suppose an argument could be made that the foreigners could work remotely, but then they don’t need to be in Japan, and that would burst the come-to-Japan balloon that many of these people are floating.

Why don’t Japanese speak English, some might wonder? Well, the short answer is that they don’t need to.

Additionally, although Japan never succeeded at conquering enough countries for long enough to force their language down the throats of many non-Japanese in a lasting manner, the situation with English is quite different. The success of anglophone incursions into countries and linguistic lives all over the globe has fostered a cohort of native English speakers who think that English is a given.

Many they think that having to learn Japanese places them at an unfair disadvantage with respect to native Japanese speakers. Fair or not, they are correct about the disadvantage and just need to suck it up.

Have not much to say? Create content instead.

Not so many years ago, before problems were reinvented as issues, services as solutions, and jobs as roles, people who had something to say would sometimes write those things.

These days, people increasingly identify as “content creators,” but some of this trendy content creation strikes me as aiming to obviate the need to have something to say. Just create “content” instead; it’ll make you “stand out.” And some of the people identifying as content creators don’t seem to have much to say, or to write, or to “create.”

The American Translators Association a short while ago promoted a webinar aimed at helping translators write translation content. Well, at least their choice of the verb write is refreshing. For members, it was just USD 45 for the hour-long webinar.

The webinar was billed as helping translators find what topics to write about. Don’t they know? Is that really necessary? We are often told to write about what we know. Does that mean…?

Perhaps it is aimed at translators who have so much to say they cannot decide what to write about, or perhaps it’s for those who have nothing to say. I’ll let you guess which.

This “translation content” is described as giving you visibility and as being good for marketing. Perhaps, but it sounds like participants are going to be told things they should have been able to figure out on their own. Perhaps more importantly, just who is the “translation content” intended for?

It was only USD 45 for the hour-long webinar, but with no indicated limit on the number of participants, if you get my drift. Perhaps ATA should run a webinar for USD 45 to teach participants how to run webinars for USD 45. That might be a better strategy than creating…uh, writing content.