Dial me Yesteryear

The other day I saw a comical meme depicting a young person being puzzled as to how to use a dial telephone. If we are not there already, the day will come when almost nobody will remember ever “dialing” someone’s phone number.

I am beginning to think that there will be a day when there will be few people nominally “in translation” who will remember the days when earning a living by translating was possible. By that time in the not-too-distant future, most people in need of translation will have learned as part of their education that machine translation is available (no need to invoke the buzzword AI, since “translacide by MT” was happening way before the Great 2020s AI Hype), and that will cause a drastic deprecation of the efforts necessary to learn a foreign language.

People who persist in learning foreign languages will have been told—the universities having finally agreed to recognize reality—that there are few careers open to people who want to translate, but that they might be able to make some money post-editing machine translation output if they have no other employment paths available.

The above-noted day will surely come, but when?

Although most commercial translators working in fields with traditionally high demand will cease to receive much translation work in perhaps two to three years (probably around mid-2027 for Japanese-to-English translators), they will still remember the good old days. Some of them will move away from translation and language-related careers entirely and, when you take into account the newcomers that will have been groomed to be post-editors coming into the labor market, I would think that even the memory of actually doing translation will be pretty much gone in about 20 years.

Perhaps more than in the past, newcomers studying Japanese will have hopes of doing translation in creative or entertainment-related fields, but literature was never easy as an income-earning profession (even for original authors), and games and subtitling—highly competitive even before the glut of translators resulting from MT adoption—will not be attractive from the standpoint of earnings, however popular and exciting those fields may be.

It’s coming. In fact, it is here for some people.

Things Japan Gets Right

William Lise

People often complain about this or that aspect of Japan that doesn’t match their expectations. These complaints often come from foreigners in Japan, some of them having lived here for years. I refer to these people as terminally disgruntled foreign residents. But there are many things that Japan gets right, some trivial, some not at all trivial. Here are just a few.

The Healthcare System

I have lived in Japan this time for close to a half-century and have not once heard of a person here having to declare personal bankruptcy because of medical expenses. Almost every single Japanese (and most foreign residents) are covered by government health insurance, the premiums for which are linked to income and very low for low-income workers. Once you have the government insurance, both incidental, day-to-day medical care and hospitalization and surgical procedures are so inexpensive that some people outside Japan—and certainly people in the US—might think that I have lied when I have reported the low costs. The other day, for example, I had an electrocardiogram and a consultation with a doctor, and my out-of-pocket payment was JPY 520 yen (approximately USD 3.40 as of this writing).

And when you are hospitalized and serious expenses occur, a special provision kicks in to avoid having to be hit with catastrophic expenses, effectively limiting the top amount you will pay out-of-pocket in any calendar month. When I was hospitalized years ago with a broken leg, the amount of my payment was less than JPY 180,000 (around USD 1,300 at the time), which included several weeks in the hospital and two surgical procedures, one of which fitted me with a titanium plate to mend my fracture.

Local Seismic Intensity Reporting of Earthquakes

The magnitude of an earthquake is a representation of the size of the earthquake itself and is not representative of the amount of shake (seismic intensity) at any particular location. Japan has always (in my experience) reported the seismic intensity, or shake level, at various locations affected by an earthquake. The magnitude of an earthquake has been reported in recent years, but is an afterthought, which is understood by—and is of concern to—seismologists, but is not indicative of whether houses or bridges might be collapsing at any particular location. Not only is the earthquake magnitude of limited use, it is such an unfamiliar term to non-specialists here that, to avoid misunderstandings, the news providers universally say “the magnitude, which represents the size of the earthquake itself” in reports of earthquakes.

Here in Japan, we understand what a seismic intensity of six is—pretty scary and there is likely serious structural damage—but a “magnitude of 6.0” means that somewhere (and probably distant from where you sit listening to the report) had an earthquake of that size. Japan gets it right with seismic intensity.

Numbers Instead of Names for Typhoons

Japan has traditionally, and continues to this day, to number typhoons in the sequence of occurrence. Probably reflecting some agreement between meteorologists in Asia, Japan recently pretends to adopt names of typhoons used in or heading toward Asia when the discussion is in English, but domestically still almost never mentions those names when reporting typhoons in Japanese; the sequential numbering only is still used. The Asian names of the typhoons are apparently rotated through various Asian language and cultures. They are unfamiliar and difficult to use in Japanese, and they lack the information of sequence number provided by the Japanese numbering system still in use domestically. Japan gets in right with naming (numbering) typhoons.

Public Transportation

Japan’s excellent public transportation system should need no explanatory comments, so I will just say that, I haven’t owned a car for the most recent 40 years of my almost 50 years in Japan this time, and I cannot recall even once feeling inconvenienced. Japan gets it right by providing excellent public transportation.

Non-collaborative Collaboration

William Lise

“Collaboration” is a usually inappropriate and arguably deceptive term skillfully promoted by translation brokers to freelance translators, many of whom have adopted the term into their active vocabulary as if it reflects reality; it usually does not.

With rare exceptions, when a freelance translator says that they are collaborating with an agency, there is no more collaboration going on than when a farmer sells lettuce to a grocery shop that resells the lettuce.

The functions, if any, performed the translation broker are usually at best analogous to the grocery shop washing off the lettuce before selling it to their customers. They don’t know much about the lettuce they are purchasing for resale, and that is about the level of involvement that the translation brokers that sell most of the translation that is purchased are capable of—or desirous of—having in the translation process.

Even the lettuce-washing task (post-editing of machine-translation output for many translation brokers these days) is often given to non-employees outside the shop, some of whom might themselves be capable of farming, but usually not selling, lettuce.

Recent advances in technology have enabled translation brokers to produce their own pesticide-sprinkled lettuce, eliminating even their need to purchase lettuce, confident that there will be non-employee, out-of-work lettuce farmers standing at the ready to wash the produce off for them. That confidence is turning out to be warranted.

This is the nature of the translation-brokering business. It will only get worse for the lettuce farmers, some of whom might be able to set up and sell at roadside stands, but there is not much time left to do that, and many are loathe to even think of it.

Breaking up and Honesty

William Lise

As freelance translation orders from agencies wind down (remember, please, that some Titanic passengers were doing just fine until the end), I am surprised translation organizations have not made efforts to counsel their members on what else can reasonably be done to survive.

While it is clearly impossible for most translators even to buy time by getting direct clients that don’t use AI, there are other things that can be done, but they’re not being talked about, unless I’m missing something, and I don’t think I am.

I am not referring to offering a suite of services related to AI that are being demanded by agencies, namely post-editing and other peripheral services that are not themselves translation, these services sometimes being talked about or implied as a means of “adapting” to AI.

And I am not referring to freelance translators using AI themselves, because they would need to find clients that don’t themselves use AI, and that is impossible for most translators.

Nor do I refer to going into fields such as entertainment translation that, while interesting, attractive and popular, represent only tiny amounts of demand compared with the mainstream translation fields that have supported most freelancers in the past. In addition, such popular fields are highly competitive and don’t offer attractice income possibilities.

Alhough suggestions of the above-noted strategies provide convenient and anodyne presentation topics, they don’t address the real problem directly and miss the point of what is happening.

I refer rather to in-house jobs that require knowledge and skills other than translation and that either require language ability or are made easier to acquire if you are bilingual.

That said, many of those positions are not going to be available to people well into their careers or to people who can’t pick up and just live somewhere else, because—surprise, surprise—many “real” jobs require you to go into work, and a good portion of the freelance translator population has for decades enjoyed the ability to work at a distance from—and out of sight of—the people who pay them.

Still, I think that the translation organizations are missing out on a moral opportunity to give advice on what can be done after it’s all over, and the “all over” is  clearly happening, not-so-slowly, and surely. The same can probably be said of universities. Both translation organizations and universities appear to be opting for the appearance of relevance, even if not justified, over substantial usefulness to working translators and prospective translators, even if that usefulness boils down to telling them where else they might go. Organizations such as Japan Association of Translators and American Translators Association have opted for dishonesty by omission.

The translator-agency relationship is breaking up, which we know is hard to do, and honesty is such a lonely word, as Neil Sedaka and Billy Joel put it.

Taking Silly to a New Level

I hope clients who purchase my language services have a wonderful “purchasing experience,” and I hope they understand the efforts we make to protect them from silly buzzwords. Actually, it’s not at all difficult to avoid silly language, but even some major broadcasters are not immune to the temptation to sound silly.

In a BBC story describing up-market Vietnamese smugglers catering to Vietnamese migrants this date, we find:

Our investigation—including interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and clients, French police, prosecutors and charities—reveals how Vietnamese migrants are paying double the usual rate for an “elite” small boat smuggling experience that is faster and more streamlined.

A defense of this might be that BBC was intending to be facetious, but the rampant misuse of “experience” following nouns of all varieties makes me doubt it.

I can’t help but imagine these smugglers providing smuggling solutions and empowering the migrants to elevate their voyage and assimilation (or hiding) experiences. Perhaps the smugglers explain this on their LinkedIn page or in a short video somewhere.

The list of silly buzzwords and expressions that warrant corporal punishment of indiscriminating users continues to grow.