Month: December 2024

Has the anonymity of the Internet made it time to pull the plug on volunteering information?

There is a growing trend of resignation to the unlawful online publishing of intellectual property by anonymous actors, without permission of the copyright holder.

People conveniently misunderstand public and downloadable as being public domain; it is not. And crediting the source does not make it lawful, particularly when the content unlawfully published in this manner constitutes the major part of a post to social media platforms or the like, which is usually the case.

Some people, usually anonymous or pseudonymous and not identifiable, have built their entire online presence by unlawfully publishing content without permission to do so from the owner.

On Zuckerberg’s stolen IP cesspool, Facebook, these thieves often position themselves as “digital creators.”

  • They are not digital creators, but merely thieves.
  • They, like their enablers, such as Mark Zuckerberg, demonstrate no socially redeeming value, and their posts almost never even reveal the name of the person with no socially redeeming value.

Although these criminal acts are most visible in the unlawful publishing of rather frivolous things like Gary Larson Fareside cartoons, the underlying notion that thievery must be accepted because you can’t stop it and there are no consequences for the thieves also underscores the risks anyone faces by publishing in public on the Internet.

I have had my business content stolen twice by Chinese thieves running translation brokers. They were anonymous and—because they were in China—unreachable by me. They ignored cease and desist notices.

The same type of content was also stolen once by someone here in Japan, but I was able to make them take down the material because I could identify them.

And one time a significant amount of content I wrote concerning the Imperial Japanese Navy was republished—without permission or crediting—as a Wikipedia page written by an unidentifiable thief.

All of this points to the strategy of simply not publishing anything of value in public, where it is available to unidentifiable and unknowable persons. This is something that I’m going to be giving some thought to in the coming days.

Missing the Point Again

William Lise

Anodyne presentations to freelance translators framed as discussion of whether to “embrace or reject AI” completely miss or actively look away from the fundamental problem presented by AI to freelancers.

Agency clients of freelancers are quickly moving away from using professionals to do translations, and most freelancers are not equipped to find and acquire clients who will not use AI themselves.

Some freelancers are being told that adopting or “adapting to” AI themselves is the answer. It is not. Some translators inexplicably think that forming a company is the answer. It is not. But mostly, freelancers are subjected to diversionary and not very actionable presentations and comments by both colleagues and translation organizations.

Some freelancers living in their source-language country are not able to interface successfully with clients in their source language. Some of them abhor the idea of selling from the get go, and many of them are members of the large majority of translators who have been “groomed to meet their end” by becoming accustomed to and totally reliant on being able to work at a distance from clients, without even going outside of their homes or meeting people.

For the few freelance translators who will survive, in order even to buy some time before the end arrives, the discussion needs to focus not on the merits of AI, but on how to acquire clients not using—and not willing to use—AI. That means selling.

Selling involves doing much more than most freelancers want to think about, and the sad, career-ending reality is that most freelance translators are not nearly equipped to do much more than sit in front of their computers. That’s not going to work for the vast majority of translators, for whom the end is on the visible horizon.

The Successive Downsizing of the Aspirations of Japanese-Language Learners Aiming at Being Translators

The following downspiral of aspirations isn’t necessarily what any single translator might experience when learning to become a translator of Japanese, and numerous intermediate steps would be impossible for many to attempt. But the sequence is representative of the successively broken dreams of Japanese learners who start out learning Japanese with hopes of doing translation work quite unlike what they will face in the real world and then ultimately learn that even the mindnumbingly boring types of work will not be available.

  • Making a living translating Japanese literature, getting to meet authors, and getting your name on the cover of a book
  • Making a living translating anime, manga, and games
  • Making a living translating things about Japanese culture
  • Making a living creatively translating Japanese marketing content
  • Making a living translating Japanese legal documents
  • Making a living translating Japanese patents
  • Making a living translating Japanese internal documents, emails, and the like, including things like agreements for the installation of solar panels and receipts from restaurants
  • Making a living translating anything in Japanese just to, well, make a living
  • Making a living doing something else

The enshittification of LinkedIn is in full swing.

Faced with the accelerating disappearance of translation work from their normal translation broker clients, freelancers translators will not find much use in LinkedIn, and the value of the platform to just about anyone has seriously diminished, for a number of reasons.

  • TikTok-like videos, including promotion of crypto.
  • Misdirected ads looking for people to train AI to take their jobs.
  • Countless narcissistic self-congratulatory posts by people with not much to offer other than narcissistic self-congratulatory posts.
  • Self-styled coaches working the aisles of desperate people looking for jobs.
  • Countless requests to connect from people who mistakenly think I am either a potential source of translation work for them or a customer for their coaching. I am neither.
  • Requests to connect from people who not only have had no engagement with me, but also have no commonality of interests with me and who have mindlessly bought into the fantasy that lots of connections on LinkedIn means “LinkedIn success,” but haven’t figured out that “LinkedIn success” will not put food on the table.
  • And, among translator users of LinkedIn, a growing unwillingness to face what is happening, which is clearly that machine translation is eliminating their ability to make a living. Delusions and denials abound, and people pointing out the problem, even in a non-hostile tone, are seen to be a nuisance. It’s ending for the deniers, but they will continue their mindless denial until the end arrives for them, which is visible on the horizon.