There has been a kerfuffle recently in Japan surrounding a term that can be translated as existential crisis. It revolved around the newly elected PM’s mentioning that an attack by China on Taiwan could be taken to be an existential crisis, apparently for Japan, although that was not explicitly stated. This led me to think about something closer to the lives of translators that could be called an existential non-crisis.
Some translators might think that the appearance of AI has created an existential crisis for human translators. I disagree, because the use of the term crisis implies a possibility of surviving the crisis. For almost all freelance translators—and arguably many translation companies, although a bit later—survival as a translation provider isn’t in the cards.
It is time for both translators and their organizations to stop pretending—either by studied silence or by active denial and diversionary handwaving—that human translators are not already being replaced by AI on a devastating scale or won’t shortly be almost totally eliminated from the translation process step.
It is also time to realize that the essential and immutable enabling condition for the demise of human translators by AI use is the two-tier brokered structure of freelance translating, and that this condition was satisfied decades before AI appeared. That structure welcomed and fostered a population of freelancers who are willing to be isolated from translation consumers—some even welcomed that isolation—and who are incapable of surviving when the only client demographic available to most of them decides to replace them with AI.
Continuing the pretense of resilience in the face of the AI transformation might feel good (or at least might feel less painful than the truth), but it won’t change things.
Let’s get real and look at the real future, which will be radically different from what most translators imagined when they started translating. For most current freelance translators, that future won’t involve translating.
Are translators’ organizations giving this any thought? It’s hard to tell. One organization I am familiar with is basically silent on this situation. They hold occasional events on topics of interest to a small group of translators in a limited subject-matter domain, but they appear to have lost relevance to many members, judging from their significant loss of members, starting in 2016, long before the pandemic, which has sometimes been cited as the cause of the drop in membership.
I placed this post here because I suspected that, placed somewhere else, it would evoke serious pushback, denial, and even anger from the very people who will shortly be—or already are—ex-translators. Pushback, denial, and anger won’t change things.
