From Google, upon being asked whether freelance translation is ending.
Freelance translation is not ending, but it is undergoing a massive transformation. While generative AI and machine translation (MT) have eliminated low-end, commodity translation work and depressed rates across many agencies, experts and experienced linguists remain in high demand. The market now requires professionals to shift from translating raw text to providing specialized, high-value services.
Huh? I guess I should not be surprised to see this self-serving Google AI overview when I asked it the rhetorical question of whether freelance translation is ending. Google is heavily into promoting AI, and it is best (for them) not to characterize AI as anything other than an uplifting technology that is reconstructing our world in a positive way.
What generative AI and machine translation have eliminated is definitely not limited to low-end, commodity translation work. Rather, it’s translation of subject matter that requires a human to understand it and be able to write for readers familiar with same.
Does this Google collection of software commands posing as intelligence “think” that patent translation is low-end, commodity translation? How about legal, business/finance, medical, and pharmaceutical? How about a 100-page document describing the operation of an MRI system?
These are the mainstream fields that the great majority of freelance JA-EN translators have made a good living from for decades. We are now told that they represent low-end, commodity translation. Well, yes, after the translation-brokering agencies reduce their evaluation of translation in those fields to peanuts because their AI system, followed by repair work done by desperate former translators will work for them and their clients, and it is indeed working.
“Experts and experienced linguists” are in high demand? Well, perhaps, but only because most are trapped in a captive labor pool that can go nowhere else to obtain gainful work, including competing with the AI translation broligarchs for direct clients, and are willing to work for a fraction of what they could have earned before having their lunch eaten by AI-using translation brokers. And those newl required services are claimed to be high-value, but they are being paid insultingly low.
Being called a linguist is not going to pay any bills for mid-career translators who have lots of mid-career life expenses and had expected to be able to live without a financial threat from technology. The story doesn’t end, however, with Google’s off-the-mark take on the effect of AI on freelance translating.
It’s bad enough having places like Google feed you this nonsense. Organizations purporting to represent the interests of translation practitioners are falling in line, chanting the “new role” mantra and acting like people should just roll with the punch and take on those exciting new roles. That is simply irresponsible and contrary to their professed mission statements, but I guess these people need to pretend they and the organizations they run are still relevant, and to hell with the practitioner members who are seeing their relevance rapidly fading away.