Month: May 2025

There’s a FOMO frenzy over AI, and ITI is encouraging it.

It looks like ITI is revealing their mindset when they promote an online multimodule CPD course from a university that:

  • teaches and promotes to translators the use of AI in translation, and
  • costs GBP 375.

Does the ITI really think this is what it should be doing?

Are translators to be led to believe that AI is the solution to their problems?

More importantly and totally unrelated to AI use by translators, does the ITI have any plans to help its members learn how to find new clients when their AI-using agency translation clients are gone (for many, they are already gone)?
Hint: It’s not by telling new prospective clients that they are ITI members.

Either the ITI just has some unspoken reason to promote this costly CPD course or it is seriously out of touch with the real world of translation and the translation business faced by freelancers.

Appalling is too kind a word for this.

I naturally don’t use AI, but go ahead and use it if it helps. It won’t result in clients ordering translations, however, because that requires sales, and selling to the kind of clients freelancers facing an existential crisis need involves doing things above and beyond making posts on LinkedIn and taking courses on how to use AI.

Get real (again)!

The Internet and social media in particular, which essentially guarantee anonymity and prevents accountability, have pretty much destroyed trust. When the current torrent of AI-generated text and images is added to the picture, trust can safely be declared dead, and it shows no signs of being resurrected. 

This technology was exciting and promising at the outset some decades ago, but it has gone astray, led off the path by the promise to platform providers of fabulous wealth and by the arguably justified confidence that the ignorance and inaction of people sleeping at the wheel, including both legislators and user-victims, would protect their gold mine.

Given the poor prognosis for recovery, I think it’s time to retreat from the digital world and advance (back) into the real world, and the real world is not on your iPhone screen or computer display.

Get real!