Category: For Colleague Professionals

Wishful Thinking and Delusions

I keep seeing wishfully thinking freelance translators saying that clients will come back to them when they realize how bad AI translations are. My observations of the real world are quite different.

  • As agency clients of freelancers migrate to using AI themselves to do translations extremely cheaply and quickly for their clients, they will not be returning to freelancers for translation, and freelancers will either be driven out of translating for a living or accept drastically reduced expectations of earnings.
  • If translation consumers use agencies that employ AI to do translation for them extremely cheaply and quickly (they have already started), they will not return to or engage with agencies still using professional translators, and those professional-using agencies will no longer be around to support the livelihoods of professional translators.

Both the above are clearly already in progress in the translation industry, and it is clearly a translation industry.

Quality is not an issue, because quality is good enough when it is cheap enough and fast enough. Once quality expections are lowered, they will resist being restored to previous levels.

If you avoid wishful thinking and delusions about where things are going in the near future—and where they currently are for many practitioners—the picture comes into focus.

Tough words, perhaps, but life’s tough, and then they expect you to post-edit.

The Impossibly Dreamy Mission Statement

[Originally posted to LinkedIn on January 29, 2025]

As part of a continuing demonstration of one of their mission statement items that they cannot fulfill, a certain translators’ organization in Japan has a job board on its website where people needing translation or interpreting can post jobs.

A peek at the board today revealed a rather disturbing picture of where the industry is and where that organization is in terms of its lack of clout in reaching people who need language services and are willing to pay for them.

  • An Indian agency looking for editing of papers written in English by Japanese ESL academics.
  • AI training (two different ads by the same company)
  • Fixed monthly income of ¥300,000 for a Japanese native speaker to work doing interpreting of online meetings and writing reports.
  • Post-editing of videos that have been AI-translated.
  • A well-known Japanese company looking for a Japanese native to act as a translator into Japanese and, amazingly, also as an editor of translations into English.

The above is very representative of what has come to be seen on that job board for quite some time now.

While said translators’ organization is certainly not responsible for, and couldn’t vet these ads by other entities on its website, the above gives no evidence of the group’s clout with—and visibility to—entities needing services that have provided work to most of the Japanese-to-English translators who have supported the translation industry for decades. Mainstream translators are on their way out, as is the above-noted group.

It’s ending, folks. Well, more precisely, it has ended already, for translators, and also for this translators’ organization, which has long had a mission statement made up of bloated goals, most of which could never be achieved. That was true when I was the President of the group, and it is still true.

The group lost a significant portion of its membership in recent years, and needs to come to grips with that reality and take the appropriate action, which is to not continue to act like a mover and a shaker in translation. It is not, never was, and never will be.

At best, it is a group that occasionally holds enjoyable social events—albeit promoted as being something quite different—but it has traditionally posed as a group with much more influence than it could ever achieve.

It never had the power improve the status of translators (except among translators, which means little), and should stop acting like it does. It’s ending, as sure as the sun rises in the east.

Chickens are not egg collaborators.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 28, 2025]

Freelance translators need to stop “collaborating.”

A translator who sells a translation to a translation-brokering agency is no more “collaborating” with the agency (and the agency with them) than a chicken is collaborating with a supermarket when its eggs are sold to the supermarket for resale.

The supermarket has no chickens themselves and nobody at the supermarket is capable of laying eggs. Added to that is their lack of ability to improve the quality of eggs they purchase for resale and we have an airtight case against the use of the word collaboration for what goes on in the egg business and in the translation business.

In the brokered translation business as well, the broker’s lack of translation ability and frequent lack of ability even to judge and fix quality problems without also outsourcing those tasks both are evidence of the erroneous use of collaboration to describe what is happening.

The feel-good term collaboration has been adopted by many translators from the narrative used by agencies in the hope that the translators from whom they purchase translations for resale will erroneously think that they are equals. They are not, because they don’t have translation consumer clients, which are going to be an important survival strategy for some translators.

Many others choose to believe the unwarranted optimism of thinking that AI won’t replace them, but most will need to sit and post-edit until they are totally replaced. Some have already been replaced.

The first step in regaining your agency is to stop sounding like you are collaborating with agencies, because you are not.

It might be helpful to look at the etymology of the term collaboration.

After freelancers graduate from collaborating, they might consider distancing themselves from being “linguists” that accept “projects,” two more terms in the broker narrative that are not heard from direct clients, which is where the few translators who will survive need to focus.

There are reasons not to boast about your terminology research ability.

I sometimes hear freelance translators complaining about AI, saying that it just spits up poor translations quickly and cheaply, whereas they, being professional translators, can do things like “terminology research.” This ability is also sometimes cited as a justification for taking higher rates.

This makes me wonder about the nature of (and reasons for) this terminology research. I also wonder whether it is something to brag about, or rather something that is best kept hidden, at least from potential direct clients, a client demographic that—as AI-using translation-brokering agencies move away from purchasing the services of professional translators—might allow some translators to buy some time.

If you have one or more fields of specialization and competence, you should need to do little research when translating in those fields. There is, however, a long-standing resistance by some translators to specialization, perhaps because it is feared that specialization will result in an insufficient amount of work.

It could also be that people believe that they can Google their way out of problems caused by unfamiliarity with the subject matter they have been asked to translate. That view is probably comforting to translators who have neither true field-specific expertise nor clients that can provide enough translation work in a small number of fields in which they could achieve a level of understanding that goes beyond Googling terminology.

What message does boasting about terminology researching send to a client?

If your main clients are translation-brokering agencies, regardless of how they position themselves—for example, as “global providers of language solutions” or some other bloated characterization—you are probably not dealing with somebody at the agency who has much field-specific knowledge. They tell their clients that they have expert translators in any and every field, then purchase translations from freelancers and hope for the best. The client is comforted by being able to tell themselves that their documents are in the hands of experts, the actual expertise of which they are, of course, not provided the opportunity to verify beforehand. Translation tests are not reliable tests of actual understanding.

But if you need to deal with direct clients, you will most likely be directly interacting with people who might wonder about your abilities.

Why do you need to do terminology research, the client might wonder. Is it that the work they need done is beyond your scope of knowledge and understanding? If you need to meet and interface directly with those clients—something very likely with direct clients, particularly Japanese clients for JA-EN translations—they will be able to discover the answer to that question very quickly.

Unlike “project managers,” the people you need to deal with at direct clients are experts in the things they need you to translate. If you don’t have expert knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, the relationship will probably be difficult to establish, and you could be facing a series of gently slammed doors as you ply your translation wares among the direct client demographic.

The “Value” of Agencies

The above situation underscores the problematical value of a broker between translators and translation consumers. The brokers are free to lie about the expertise of “their translators” and hope for the best in being able to purchase translations for their clients, even using less-than-expert translators who will do their best to “research” their way out of problems caused by insufficient domain-specific knowledge.

What are the outcomes?

It often works, precisely because there is an intermediate broker, which might not provide added value beyond acting as what could be called a distress buffer. The translator is saved from a trial-by-expertise that would happen when facing a translation consumer (direct client), and the client is allowed to tell themselves that an expert is doing their translations.

As most translation-brokering agencies move closer to not having to purchase translation services from professionals, however, the protective brokering arrangement will shortly become a thing of the past, and that change is already well underway.

Agencies will use mostly machine translation, with or without the requisite buzzword AI, and translators hoping to survive will need to face and acquire non-AI using clients. Since that will mean mostly direct clients, the domain-specific knowledge hurdles faced by a translator will grow dramatically, leaving many translators out in the cold and, ironically, perhaps looking back fondly on those brokers who would do their lying for them.

The Outlook for an Endangered Species

Executive Summary: Japanese-to-English translation work is ending for almost all freelance translators, and working translators are not the only people who need to be concerned.

Many working professional JA-to-EN translators are accustomed to getting work from agencies and are seeing their translation work shrinking or disappearing with the appearance of much cheaper MT/AI solutions that are good enough for translation-brokering agencies and good enough for the agencies’ clients.

Some freelancers are clinging to hopes that AI will fail so badly that their work will return. I would urge such translators to do some more thinking, removing themselves from like-minded optimists and focusing on the real world outside of their echo chambers.

But it’s not just working freelancers who are going to be affected by the ongoing replacement of carbon-based professionals by computer code running in silicon-based hardware. There are also the people currently studying or thinking about studying Japanese with the hope to make translation a career.

I could be kind and say that the outlook for students learning Japanese is not bright, but such kindness won’t help them. The more precise truth is that the outlook is nearly hopeless for all but a tiny number of people currently learning Japanese with hopes of earning a living by translating. If their goal is a career translating for a living, they are learning Japanese several decades too late.

There are certainly good reasons to learn Japanese, but earning a living translating is no longer alone a justifiable reason for investing the time and expending the considerable effort required to join the rapidly shrinking ranks of professional translators able to earn a living translating.

Freelance translating has gone the way of John Cleese’s parrot; it is an ex-career for all but a very small number of potential translators. Japanese ability can be a useful addition to some other, solid specialization or qualification that could stand alone as sufficient to build a career on without Japanese ability. Japanese ability alone is not going to be that useful.

The ranks of newbies entering translation and some translators’ organizations appear to be shifting their interests to entertainment translation. There are, however, several pieces of bad news for people interested in things such as anime and game translation.

  • The entertainment-related translation business is not immune to AI transformation. That has already started, and you can hear translators already moaning about it online.
  • Those entertainment-related fields are very small compared to the demand for fields such as business/finance, technical/industrial, patent, and legal, which are being taken over by AI.
  • Because of the popularity of entertainment content, competition has been fierce, making rates very low, compared to rates formerly common in the fields that are being largely taken over by AI.
  • Competition for entertainment translation work will heat up even further as many more mainstream-field translators try to shift fields to survive.

Given the above, things like anime and game translation are not promising as a lucrative field for beginning translators, nor are they safe havens for out-of-work people from other translation fields.

Regardless of what field you are in, it’s ending, the only difference being the possibility of a buying time if you can acquire clients that don’t use AI. If we are talking about Japanese-to-English translation, that essentially means direct clients, meaning it is ending for almost all freelancers, for reasons that should be easy-to-understand for freelancers.

Both educational institutions and translators’ organizations (e.g., Japan Association of Translators and ATA) must work up the courage to recognize what is happening and appropriately and honestly counsel their students and members, respectively. To do anything else is simply self-serving and irresponsible.