A radical transformation of the translation world and business has happened, even as many apparently are still looking away or brushing it off as irrelevant to them or as something they will ride out or “adapt to,” oblivious to or unwilling to acknowledge the futility of seeking to survive by translating.
When people look back at translation, where on the historical timeline will they place the effective demise of translating as a realistic career?
Will it be around 2025, when AI output followed by repair work kicked in seriously as the “translation workflow” (a term I don’t recall hearing much before the AI hype started)?
Will it be the much earlier time when freelance translators became habituated to accepting CAT usage and associated discounts as a condition for receiving work from many agency clients?
Or will it be some other, far earlier point in time, when technologies much less sophisticated than AI allowed remote work without the need to interact with translation consumers to become the expected work mode, thereby welcoming into the translation profession large numbers of people who, although they were capable translators, were almost universally ill-equipped to acquire work from any client demographic other than one that was to welcome with open arms the means for removing them as translators from their translation business model?
I would argue that it was at that earlier point, long before AI and long before mandatory CAT usage and acceptance of CAT discounts, that the die had been cast. The enabling element for the ultimate elimination of translation by humans was the establishment of an essentially captive labor pool.
Many of us didn’t see it coming with the speed and to the extent that it has. Although I don’t deal with agencies, I am in that group of foresight-challenged practitioners—as evidenced from my overly optimistic presentation at IJET-30 in Cairns, in which I rather recklessly suggested that freelancers moving from tier two to tier one was a reasonable strategy.
The picture is now clear, however, and should be acknowledged both by translators and by organizations that have been positioning themselves as supporting translators. Both, however, appear to be a bit slow in acceptance of the current situation.
Knowing where you are is a good first step in figuring out where you should go, how you might get there, and also, critically, whether you have a reasonable chance of success in getting there.
Most, I am afraid, are already seeing translation quickly receding in the rear view mirror, even as they sit stopped at the red light represented by the new business model of their clients. And so it goes.
