Month: July 2024

3D Reponses from Some Freelance Translators to the Use of AI by Translation Brokers

I have expounded at some length elsewhere on some better ways to meet the existential crisis presented to freelance translators by AI, but some translators have their own approaches.

Delusion that clients will come back when they discover how bad AI is (Reality: That AI continues to be used demonstrates that it is often good enough a large portion of the translation that is purchased), and delusion that freelancers can just adopt AI themselves to survive (Reality: They might be able to that, but not unless they radically switch their customer demographic to translation consumers and compete with agencies, and that is going to be possible for only a very small portion of the freelance translator population).

Denial of the major changes in progress and accelerating in the translation business, denial of acquiring direct clients as a useful survival strategy, and denial of the ongoing exodus of translators lacking translation work because of AI.

Desperation, quiet of course, because being openly desperate would reveal the denial behaviors to be no more than a face-saving defense mechanism.

Not all freelancers exhibit all of these reponses. Some are only suffering their desperation in silence.

I’ll say it again. The agency model for freelance translators is ending, and there is very little chance of preventing that from happening.

Confession Time: I have been translating for decades, but have never done a single translation “project” and have never “collaborated” with a client.

The reason for this apparent paradox is that my clients order translation, not translation “projects” and they wouldn’t think of using the term “collaboration” to make me feel equal to them or them to me. We are not equal, and neither of us pretends otherwise. They are clients, and I am a vendor selling them end-to-end professional translation. They issue a purchase order and I deliver the ordered translation, accompanied by an invoice for the translation I have sold them.

Countless times I have heard translators say that they collaborate with such-and-such an agency (broker). This is almost always utter nonsense.

The terms project and collaboration are from the world of translation brokering, populated by translation brokers and the freelance translators who are dependent on those brokers. Because the brokers have “project managers,” they might be forgiven to a slight extent for using the term project, but the term collaboration is pure nonsense. Brokers purchase translations from freelancers and resell those translations to their clients. There is no “collaboration” in sight.

It serves no purpose for a translator to buy into and mimic the vocabulary of translation brokers. For translators sensitive to words (and shouldn’t all translators be sensitive to words?), the use of these terms indirectly announces the tier on which a translator is operating in the translation business (or, more to the point, that they are not actually in the translation business), meaning that they are perched on a tier that is receiving fewer and fewer orders for translation lately.

I recommend that translators stop using these two brokerese terms, both among themselves and, perhaps more importantly, when interacting with translation brokers. It is not helpful to admit to admit to brokers and others that you have accepted the broker spin on what you and they do. Translators who successfully move away from brokers will of course not have to worry, because they will no longer hear about translation projects and collaboration.

Nurture, Nature, Decisions, and Luck

Most people—including translators—have met others who seem to have a special gift for doing something. For translators, this “something” is often an aptitude for learning and using a foreign language. Is it nurture or nature? I think the notion that it is one of these to the exclusion of the other or even to an overwhelming degree can be discarded. It’s more complicated.

All the inherited language-acquisition DNA in the world will not obviate study and the opportunities to acquire a foreign language. And for a person without the requisite innate ability, study will often be futile. But there are other factors that affect outcomes for a person aiming at becoming a translator.

Conscious Life and Career Decisions

Translators have numerous opportunities to make decisions that will greatly affect their lives—including their earning power—as translators. Which opportunities you decide to take can greatly affect your life as a translator. One is the choice of where to live. Even in this era of being connected anywhere at any time, your physical location can play an important role in your career outcomes, albeit often in an indirect way.

Luck

Although I might boast about the good decisions I made along the way, I must admit that good fortune has also helped me numerous times in my journey as a Japanese-to-English translator. Some of that good fortune resulted quickly in useful short-term outcomes; others resulted in longer-term results long after the fortuitous event or circumstances. And sometimes good fortune is only recognizable in hindsight.

Acquisition of Japanese

For example, as a Russian language specialist in the USN during the first Cold War, I was posted to Japan. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, that was very good fortune. It was enhanced by my active decision to learn about Japan and learn Japanese, essentially opting out of the very common life of my colleague “RUling” spooks here in the 1960s, many of whom spent their time chasing bar girls. My choice to learn Japanese and avoid English-capable locals was a good one, although at the time I didn’t fully realize the advantage and implications of that choice.

Working for a US Company in Japan

After obtaining an engineering degree and working for about five years in a fiber optics lab of a large US company, I took a job that required Japanese ability and had me establish and run the Japan branch of a US manufacturing company selling electronic products in Japan. The appearance of that opportunity was luck. Taking that job turned out to be a very good decision, not necessarily because of the work itself, but because of the peripheral opportunities it offered.

Getting Stuck Selling in Japan

Being shorthanded, I was forced to go out myself and meet clients and interact with them in Japanese. This was ostensibly bad luck and was extremely stressful. At first, however, I did it with an experienced salesperson, and I stole everything I could from him about interacting with clients. The chance to do this was good fortune. It stood me in good stead when I needed to sell my translation services.

Deciding Not to Return to the US

As my time at the US company came to an end, I opted to leave the company and stay here in Japan. This was a good decision. If I had returned to the US and then became a translator, I would probably have found myself stuck working for major translation brokers for a fraction of the rates available to translators working with direct clients in Japan. I would probably never have any interaction with translation consumers or people who write the things I would translate. This was a good choice, but I did not know it at the time, since I knew nothing about translation as a career. I am talking about the late 1970s, when I had yet to meet a translator, and the notion of becoming a translator was just beginning to form at the back of my mind, as I did a few translations for several of my clients for electronic measuring instruments.

Change What You Can

Things happening by pure fortune are out of your control. Don’t worry about them. But conscious decisions are a totally different matter. Everyone is ultimately on their own in deciding how to proceed in their career. But here are a few suggestions nobody asked me for, and as agency translation work dries up, these ideas are more relevant than they were just a few years ago.

Invest in Acquiring a Specialization

Because of agencies using AI to translate, the need to move away from agencies will place more importance on specialization. You can fool a clueless agency project manager who knows nothing about subject matter (and probably also very little about translation), but if meeting translation consumers who understand what they have written is part of a strategy to survive, you are not going to be able to Google your way out of lack of subject-matter expertise. You need to invest early in specialization.

Think about Your Location

Only a tiny fraction of the Japanese-to-English translator population has any significant work from direct clients, and most JA-EN translators in the US work almost exclusively through translation brokers. Almost none of these translators ever meet a translation consumer or even interact with anyone at their brokers who knows Japanese. Is that what you want to do for the rest of your working life as a translator?

Unless you are determined to never having to meet a translation client and never having to acquire good spoken Japanese, you might try to move to Japan to at least develop direct clients. You will have a very hard time developing any good Japanese clients from outside Japan. That’s just a feature of how business works in Japan. Once you have acquired clients in Japan, you might be able to port those clients to a new location. Even then, however, you might lose them, because the chances for interaction are greatly reduced once you have placed an ocean between you and your clients. Yes, even in the era of connection everywhere all the time.

That said, it is not easy to come to Japan to work. A foreigner cannot just waltz into the immigration [sic] office and say they have arrived and will be a freelancer. In almost all cases you need a cover story that demonstrates that you have a “real” job. Translating as a freelancer is not a “real” job. Resourcefulness is called for.

I have more annoying thoughts about survival that I will post in the coming weeks.

Engagement is better than imagined entitlement.

Numerous translators appear clueless about—or are studiously avoiding recognition of—the structure of the translation business and are claiming victim entitlement rather than trying for engagement with people who matter.

I am growing a bit weary of seeing posts by translators who have depended on translation agencies (in most cases, translation-reselling brokers) and are acting entitled and thinking of themselves as having rights akin to those that would accrue to employees, although they are not employees.

Freelance translators are clearly not employees of the brokers that purchase translations from them, but you might not think that from hearing the complaints lodged by freelance translators, who frequently ineffectively kvetch and preach to their choirs in online venues that don’t reach specific people who might offer more rewarding work and better conditions. The complaints are various.

Complaint:  Low and “exploitive” rates. There is no “minimum wage” for translation vendors, and freelance translators are translation vendors. Offering low rates is not exploitive. You are not an employee. If you don’t like an offered rate, you are free to refuse it and go elsewhere. You didn’t lose your job; you were never employed.

If all the brokers are actually offering rates too low for you to accept, the path forward is clear: You need to find another income source or be in the translation business and compete with the brokers, but first you must discover just who are the specific people you need to talk to. That is usually a non-trivial task. Hint: It’s not your cohort of translator-colleague connections on LinkedIn.

Complaint:  Resellers of entertainment-related content don’t credit or allow disclosure of a translator’s identity and force translators they purchase translations from to sign NDAs promising not to discuss or disclose the work they did for the broker. This is only natural from the standpoint of the translation-reselling broker. They want to be seen as the provider of the translation and they are indeed the provider of the translation as seen from the end users (the brokers’ clients). They benefit from being themselves credited and have no reason to defer to a translator if they can get a translator to agree to a gag-order NDA.

Jurisdiction-dependent enforceability issues aside, if you sign such an NDA, you have no basis to complain. What? You say that you cannot get work without signing an NDA? Then you need to look elsewhere and start engaging in translation as a business. You are not an employee being denied employment if you don’t sign an NDA; you are a vendor being asked to agree to conditions that are unacceptable to you, so refuse the conditions and walk away.

Understanding the Structure of the Translation Business

Translators need to remember that the brokers purchasing translations from freelancers and reselling them to their clients are in the translation business, and your path away from the disadvantages this presents to freelancers is to engage in the translation business yourself. You have a right to walk away, and you have the opportunity to attempt to break out of tier two of the translation business and start engaging in the translation business from tier one, from which you interact with—and sell to—direct clients (translation consumers). The large number of translators who cannot do that will be ex-translators in the not-too-distant future. The writing is on the wall.

As translation brokers rapidly migrate from purchasing translations from freelancers to using AI themselves to produce what are arguably characterized as artificial translations and then ordering just post-editing, the surviving translators will more and more be those who can reinvent and rethink themselves as professionals engaging in the translation business.

That is not going to be possible for many translators. The need for a mindset reset can combine with previous real-life experience (or, more likely, the lack of it) and life decisions (place of residence, particularly in my language pair, JA-EN) to make things very difficult.

I cannot find words to console those who cannot do that or for whom the process would be too painful. They will probably need to sit and wait for the end. And the more entitled you are in displaying your discomfort with this situation, the quicker the end will likely come. Get engaged and stop acting entitled.

Professional translators need to identify and use their advantages over AI and need to bring those advantages to an audience that cares.

I have written about getting up and out of tier two of the translation business (where most translators are) elsewhere, and the need to think about doing that has clearly grown since my presentation on that topic back in 2019. With the subsequently accelerated migration of agencies to AI followed by post-editing, that presentation is more relevant today than it was five years ago.

Lately, a significant number of translators fear that AI will take away much of their work. Let me say this: That fear is justified, and is playing out already.

In response to this fear, numerous translators can be heard claiming that their sensitivity to cultural differences will set them apart from—and place them above—AI translation. For most translation, however, this is an empty argument, as most of the translation that is sold is not related to or affected by cultural differences.

Translation of creative works (including games, anime, and other entertainment content) is a tiny demand segment, compared to domains that generate very little buzz but bring in great amounts of income for people in the translation business. Even adding marketing doesn’t tip the volume much toward subject matter that would require cultural sensitivity.

Similar to the ineffectiveness of talking about culture is the invoking the translator-created buzzword transcreation, which is quite irrelevant when the subject matter being translated is not culture-specific or “creative.” For most translation, invoking the transcreation mantra is no more meaningful or effective than repositioning products and services as solutions.

Translation in the fields of finance, engineering/manufacturing, medicine, pharmaceuticals, patents, and legal, for example, are natural targets for AI, and they are already being done to a considerable extent by AI. And a considerable amount of the JA-EN discovery document translation demand for litigation in the US, which is arguably a subset of legal translation, has been handled in recent years by translation brokers in China and is now in the process of migrating to AI systems in various venues. Seldom does translation in these various commercially important fields have any cultural aspects that deserve special attention. What should a translator of these buzz-challenged subjects do?

I think it’s time for professional translators to recognize and exploit their true advantages, the things that AI cannot provide.

One of the strengths of a professional translator is the ability to care. AI doesn’t care and cannot care. It cannot care to ask pointed questions about a source text. It cannot care about the purpose or the presumed readers of a document, and it cannot care about context, either within a document or within a stream of documents of which the document currently being translated is a part. More seriously, it cannot care whether it is even capable of translating a particular text. It just spits out a translation, with the owner or user of the AI assuming that a cheap-enough post-editor will be able to make the translation good-enough to sell.

For many types of translation, the above level of AI indifference might not create serious problems, particularly when considered together with the deep reduction in cost and blinding speed brought by AI.

It remains, therefore, for the translator to identify and acquire clients that value the care that a professional translator can bring to the translation process, and value translators willing to walk the extra mile and, for example, get on the phone and discuss issues that have arisen. The universe of that type of client will not include the existing large agencies that have supported and continue to support the great majority of translators. What that means for translators and what translators should do to survive is clear.

Another strength of a professional translator is end-to-end accountability. Whereas the provenance of a translation produced by AI can be laundered by a translation seller claiming that an expert “linguist” takes responsibility for the accuracy and overall quality of a translation because they post-edited it, professional translators know that such claims are often at serious odds with the actual quality of what results from post-editing at extremely low rates. If professional translators understand this reality, they need to convey it to clients who will care about it. Again, this leads translators away from the agencies that traditionally have provided most translators their livelihoods. Those agencies, like the AI they are relying more on these days, cannot be bothered to care about accountability, as long as the brokers can fashion a believable story about how a translation was produced.

There you have it. Well, not exactly, because it is up to each individual translator not wanting to exit translation to identify and acquire specific clients and people to speak with at those clients who will care that professional translators care and that they take end-to-end responsibility for the translations they produce, something that most agency users of AI cannot and will not do, because to do so is inconsistent with the profitability of their business model and the demands of their client demographic.