Category: For Colleague Professionals

The use of AI by translation-brokering agencies is quickly bringing to an end the career of freelance translating for agencies. Freelance Japanese-to-English translation is no longer a wise career choice. Only a tiny number of freelancers will survive.

Language matters.

It certainly does, and the language used by agencies and even freelance translators discussing selling language services to agencies tells a story of deception or surrender, depending upon which side of the inappropriate terminology in that brokering relationship you’re on.

Collaboration?

Well, hardly ever does this term make sense when a translator sells translation services to an agency. This is particularly the case with the large agencies that control most of the translation-consuming clients and sell most of the language services that are paid for by clients.

Translators don’t collaborate with an agency any more than a chicken laying eggs is collaborating with a poultry farmer who cannot lay eggs themselves, but sells the eggs laid by chickens to egg consumers or to other egg sellers.

It’s actually worse with translation agencies, because, whereas most poultry farmers can probably at least themselves judge the quality of eggs laid by their chickens, many translation-brokering agencies need to enlist and pay yet other people who are not their employees for confirmation of the quality of, and correction of errors in the translations they purchase, because the agencies generally don’t have that ability themselves and need to purchase and resell that ability, again from people who are also not “collaborating” with the agencies, but rather selling them services.

People who think collaboration is an appropriate term in these cases should think about the etymology of that word.

Onboarding?

I don’t mind this term when used to describe what can happen when an employee is hired by a company, but that’s not what goes on when an agency gets a freelancer to agree to a rate and to sign an NDA. Agencies are very seldom hirers of translators, but rather are purchasers of translation services from freelance translators for resale of those services, often with post-purchase processing, which they most often need to outsource as well.

The terms collaboration and onboarding are feel-good terms that agencies hope will compensate at least in part for not treating as professionals the professionals that enable their continuing business.

These terms are also widely adopted by freelancers themselves, perhaps in the hope that they feel good if they reflect reality. They rarely do.

In decades of selling translation and interpreting to consumers and purchaers of those services, I cannot think of a single instance that I could fairly claim to have collaborated with a client. And, of course, I’ve never been onboarded by a client.

Earth to ATA! Come in please!

The text cited below, regarding translation, but in a post by ATA on LinkedIn introducing an article on AI use for visual dubbing, is perhaps the most recklessly irresponsible thing that I’ve seen ATA say, albeit backhandedly, about the currently ongoing demise of human translators.

“Many believe that translation will be one of the first ones to go”? Yes, and they are correct. But the implication of the ATA statement is that translation will not go, and the ATA goes on to chant the commonly heard mantra of “it will just change the way we work.” Really? The reality is that the work is mostly gone for countless freelance translators already.

Is it just arrogance on the part of the ATA to think that people will believe this nonsense?

Is it that the people running the organization are so desperate to maintain their own relevance that they’re willing to deceive members with this batshit crazy take on the current existential crisis? Shame on the ATA and the people running it.

Translation has already gone away for most freelancers. It’s not something that will happen in the future, and it’s not a prediction. It’s gone for almost all freelance translators, and organizations like the ATA need to stop their irresponsible statements like this.

“Changing the way we work” is a cute way of not actually recognizing that human professionals are mostly now only being asked to perform tasks that pay so little that such work is in no way a replacement for the earnings that translation work brought professionals before translation-brokering agencies migrated to AI to eliminate the need to pay humans for translating.

The reasons that the translation-brokering agencies are able to succeed as they are succeeding in replacing humans for translation might be too painful for the ATA and many of its members to discuss. But those reasons need to be discussed and understood.

I can certainly imagine the desire on the part of the ATA directors must feel to maintain their relevance even as the relevance of their members slips rapidly away, but this aspirational delusion of the work just changing is simply disingenuous at best. It’s arguably deception by implication. Knock it off.

Many believe automation and AI will fully take over a wide array of professions, and that translation will be one of the first to go. While companies are definitely deploying AI for many tasks, more often it isn’t replacing jobs so much as changing the way we work—and what is possible.

Not with a bang but a whimper: Relevance is slipping away from translation organizations.

I have written in more detail about the rather bleak output for freelancers elsewhere, but here are a few disturbing observations of what translation organizations are doing lately.

A number of major translation organizations that say they support and look out for the interests of translators—the ones I have in mind are located on three continents are—to varying degrees, but all clearly to a considerable extent—promoting non-productive belief in delusions by their members.

  • They allow and even encourage freelancer members to think that adopting AI themselves is a strategy for survival, carefully avoiding mention that the use of AI won’t attract clients for freelancers as their agency clients replace them with AI, and that only a very small number of freelancers are able to acquire clients other than agencies, which are well on their way out as purchasers of translation from freelancers. Some of the organizations, amazingly, have even taken to running or sponsoring events that sell AI-related products, teach AI use, or (more surprisingly) discuss post-editing.
  • They either themselves fail to recognize or are afraid that their members will recognize that it is not possible to earn a realistic living by doing the non-translation task of post-editing AI output.
  • They continue to promote the idea that human translators will always be needed (correct, of course), but fail to mention (or fear that their members will themselves realize) that, yes, human translators will always be needed, but only 5 to 10 percent of the current population of freelancers will be needed, and that the net number of actually working translators—post-editing is not translation—will reach that level in the very near future.

The above-noted behavior by translation organizations is uniformed at best and arguably irresponsible. It masks unspoken and unspeakable distress, but also surely is aimed at preserving the relevance of the organizations and of the people running them, in spite of most of their members seeing their own relevance slip away at a pace that defies their efforts to survive.

It is time for translation organizations to get real, face what is happening, and level with their members, rather than feeding them comfortable-sounding pap. If they cannot do that, they should think about other potential trajectories for the organizations, the most suitable one at this point being one that reduces the yearly dues needed to be paid by freelancers to organizations to zero.