Executive Summary: Freelance translation is ending as a way to make a living, having already ended for many, and nothing I can do or say will prevent that. The very few freelance translators who will survive will be able to do it on their own, without my advice. The ones who will not survive need to look elsewhere.
Two truths:
- AI translation is not yet as good as professional translation by humans and
- Clients will not come back after they start using AI.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Predictions of what is going to happen to the translation profession because of AI are meaningless, because it has already happened to a large extent.
This has seriously affected the livelihoods of countless translators who have for decades been doing the heavy lifting in the fields with high translation demand—finance, business, medical, pharmaceutical, technical/industrial of all types, patent, and legal.
Not knowing or admitting when things are coming to an end didn’t help the people on the Titanic, and—with the possible exception of the small number of translators working in several low-demand fields (such as anime, manga, and other entertainment fields, which are tiny compared to the above-noted high-demand fields)—translators need to realize and admit that the freelance translation ship has already hit the AI iceberg, and should realize that the organizations that they pay dues to are complicit in the studious avoidance of discussing the AI iceberg. Surely they wish to maintain the appearance of relevance for their members and also themselves, but that behavior is self-serving and irresponsible, and I might write a bit more about that shortly.
A while back I planned to write a considerable number of new articles aimed at colleague translators working in those high-demand fields that are going away, and I had written some already and readied other legacy articles for republishing.
There were articles having to do with the actual practice of translation and others having to do with strategies for survival.
That doesn’t make sense anymore.
But being a good translator is not sufficient to survive, and useful survival strategies can be implemented only by people who would have been able to survive without advice from me.
Those who will leave or agree to do low-paid repair work are mostly those who don’t have what it takes to deal with anything but agencies already using AI or who are in circumstances that hinder survival efforts. This can be for a number of reasons, including:
- Early life decisions (for example, place of residence)
- Level of field-specific knowledge (translation consumers are not impressed that you can Google for terminology, because it means you don’t understand their documents and their subject matter)
- Aversion to selling, and (particularly for JA-EN translators in Japan)
- Japanese speaking ability
It’s ending. No, wait, that’s wrong. It has already ended for most.