[Originally posted to LinkedIn on January 29, 2025]
As part of a continuing demonstration of one of their mission statement items that they cannot fulfill, a certain translators’ organization in Japan has a job board on its website where people needing translation or interpreting can post jobs.
A peek at the board today revealed a rather disturbing picture of where the industry is and where that organization is in terms of its lack of clout in reaching people who need language services and are willing to pay for them.
- An Indian agency looking for editing of papers written in English by Japanese ESL academics.
- AI training (two different ads by the same company)
- Fixed monthly income of ¥300,000 for a Japanese native speaker to work doing interpreting of online meetings and writing reports.
- Post-editing of videos that have been AI-translated.
- A well-known Japanese company looking for a Japanese native to act as a translator into Japanese and, amazingly, also as an editor of translations into English.
The above is very representative of what has come to be seen on that job board for quite some time now.
While said translators’ organization is certainly not responsible for, and couldn’t vet these ads by other entities on its website, the above gives no evidence of the group’s clout with—and visibility to—entities needing services that have provided work to most of the Japanese-to-English translators who have supported the translation industry for decades. Mainstream translators are on their way out, as is the above-noted group.
It’s ending, folks. Well, more precisely, it has ended already, for translators, and also for this translators’ organization, which has long had a mission statement made up of bloated goals, most of which could never be achieved. That was true when I was the President of the group, and it is still true.
The group lost a significant portion of its membership in recent years, and needs to come to grips with that reality and take the appropriate action, which is to not continue to act like a mover and a shaker in translation. It is not, never was, and never will be.
At best, it is a group that occasionally holds enjoyable social events—albeit promoted as being something quite different—but it has traditionally posed as a group with much more influence than it could ever achieve.
It never had the power improve the status of translators (except among translators, which means little), and should stop acting like it does. It’s ending, as sure as the sun rises in the east.
