At the risk of accusations of having gone over to the dark side, I need to say that translators should accept the reality that the Japanese-to-English translation work that has supplied livelihoods to the great majority of freelance translators is now being handled quite satisfactorily (as determined by the paying clients, of course, not translators) by AI translation combined with editing done by former translators at very low rates.
The resulting cost is just a fraction of what it used to be, and this business model will succeed for at least a decade or two as is, with the help of currently idle translators, because a sufficient number thereof have no other career paths, but still have bills to pay.
Even after that, of course, there will be a continuing influx of Japanophilic language learners who are not aware of the real world of translation before they reach that real world and might not accept the reality of it even after they arrive there. That labor supply will continue to enable the above-noted business model. There won’t be a return to the old paradigm.
But even before the Japanophilic beginners take over post-editing from the dwindling supply of professional translators formerly working in mainstream demand fields, many translation consumers will themselves be doing AI translation and editing in-house.
That next stage of the transformation is already underway, as numerous translators continue to believe that things will work out, claimng that humans will always be needed to provide “cultural nuances.” The reality, however, is that only a tiny portion of translation that is paid for has anything to do with culture, and the parts that do can be fixed by very low-paid post-editors, at this stage meaning former translators who have no choice but to bite the low-paid post-editing bullet.
Denials, delusions, and occasional counter-indicative success stories aside, an evidence-based evaluation of where things actually already are points to exactly the above picture. The evidence?
- Specific known translators forced to leave;
- laughable rates paid to be the “human in the loop;”
- the major translation sellers that control most clients and countless new translation-selling startups offering “human-in-the-loop” AI translation as their main service;
- a paucity of translation work offered on even sleazy click-work reverse-auction platforms, which are now filled with very low-paid post-editing work;
- no evidence of either a return to human professionals or dire AI translation-caused consequences, other than unverifiable anecdotes and aspirational, wishful-thinking predictions; and
- a significant reduction and demographic transformation of the membership of the formerly most active group of JA/EN translation practitioners in Japan.
And there’s much more evidence from the real world, divorced from the aspirational predictions of survival made by people who hang out at the Denial & Delusion Café.
The above is not a pretty picture, but it is real, and you don’t have to wait for it to come to your neighborhood; it’s at your doorstep, if it’s not already in your kitchen eating your lunch.