Seeing human professionals being rapidly replaced by technology in the translation process, translators are responding in various ways, but many of those ways involve using technology or being used by technology users.
There are the adaptists and the adoptists, the former essentially surrendering to mind-numbing post-editing tasks that pay ridiculously low, and the latter calling for pro-active use of AI by freelancers to translate. There is actually another group—it’s made up of optimists who believe that clients who value human translation will remain, which is arguably not a total falsehood, but they seem never to discuss what type of enlightened client they envision, nor do they think about how very few freelancers will be supportable by that quickly disappearing client demographic.
None of these groups seems to want to think about just who will purchase their translations after the only client group they have—it’s made up of almost exclusively of translation-brokering agencies—has totally disappeared, a situation which is well underway to becoming a reality.
It would be useful for the members of these groups of optimists of various types to do some thinking about how to develop clients that have not moved away from humans yet and might not move away for at least some time. Some time can still be bought, but not by simply doing the no-risk things that have become the norm in freelancer behavior.
At least here in Japan, but surely to a great extent elsewhere as well, developing those clients boils down to doing things that don’t involve much technology—in short, it amounts to having a life outside of your computer screen and your online presence as a translator.
Face-to-face encounters in Japan are much more likely to turn into orders than developing a killer profile on LinkedIn or having a killer website, neither of which has much sales value in Japan.
Sadly, getting a life is not an option for many freelancers, precisely because they have chosen a lifestyle—it would be wrong to characterize it as a business model—that provides a working environment that makes it difficult to get a life outside of waiting in front of your computer for work to arrive.
Rather than complaining and engaging in commiseration about post-editing rates or advocating surrender terms, the energies of freelancers and the groups that purport to represent their interests would be better spent thinking about actionable survival strategies that can be adopted.
The way things have developed, those strategies don’t need and are not helped much by using technology to develop a personal brand online or doing a whole variety of things proposed by people trying to avoid getting a life in real life or trying to pretend things will be just fine. They won’t for most freelancers.