Rampant copyright Infringement has become the norm in social media.

If you copy an image and post it on Facebook or other social media platforms but you don’t have permission from the copyright owner to do so, you’re committing copyright infringement. Permission to republish or repost a copy of something is not granted by the contact being publicly downloadable. This is something that is conveniently misconstrued by many people.

If you share an image that was posted by a person who didn’t have permission to post it, you are still committing copyright infringement, albeit directly.

This kind of unlawful behavior is rampant on social media. Part of the problem is that the owners of social media platforms not only profit from the engagement that people evoke when they post images, but they also encourage the posting of images.

They appeared to welcome DMCA notices to take down copyright material, but those notices can only be issued by the owners of copyright material or their legal representatives.

Even if you post an image in a group or to just your private friends on a social media platform without permission to do so, you’re guilty of the same copyright infringement.

But there will not be serious legal consequences because it is unlikely to be detected.

Sadly, this applies even to the turds who post such images and videos on pages and the like to gain ad income from them, but such posting of images “innocently” on your own social media page is still copyright infringement. 

Copyright infringement that goes undetected is still a copyright infringement.

Looking away and looking for a way: Neither is very promising for most freelance translators.

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.

There are two opposing views of AI in translation, but neither of them informs decisions that need to be made by freelancers.

[I wrote this almost precisely as presented here for JAT’s Translator Perspectives (2024), and much of it remains valid, although the situation for freelance translators has gotten much worse since then, and the end is basically on the very near horizon.]

There is a growing polarization between AI deniers claiming that AI is not—and will never be—good enough and AI “adoptionists” suggesting that translators should adopt AI. Both positions have a grain of truth, but because both ignore the reality that translation is a business, neither view serves to inform useful decisions that must be made by translators.

AI deniers need to realize that, although there are numerous professional translators who are better than AI, most of the commercial and technical JA-EN translation work that has for decades been successfully sold to and accepted by clients in the real world has been done by humans who now cannot compete with AI, which has largely replaced them for the task of translation.

To be fair to AI adoptionists, some translators might benefit from using AI, but adoptionists generally avoid the issue of where they will find clients who will purchase their AI-created translations when almost all their clients (agencies) are using AI themselves.

AI has changed the structure of the translation business. By agencies adopting AI, the model of registering with agencies and sitting back and waiting for translation work is crumbling. It has already crumbled for numerous capable translators I know and who are no longer in translation.

Ironically, the result of AI technology is that some of the human skills and activities that other, even less-sophisticated technologies obviated decades ago are now again important, much to the dismay of translators sitting at their computers waiting for work. In a sense, the survival rules and requirements are reverting to a time before technology made things so convenient for translators.

What is a translator to do? For many, the answer to that depends greatly on age, experience, and personal decisions that might have been made decades ago.

The prognosis for most translators who started out translating a decade or two ago is not bright. Access to clients still not using AI requires skills and activities many of them probably think are just so 1990.

Meeting non-translation people and building networks is more important now. That is not easy for translators living at a distance from translation consumers and an activity not attractive to many translators.

Specialization that is convincing to clients who understand the subject matter themselves is much more important now. When your contact was a project manager at an agency, that wasn’t important. Google is not your friend, however, if you need to meet a client knowledgeable in the subject matter face-to-face, and that need will arise, particularly for translators in Japan. Having a life before translation is valuable, but time travel has not yet been invented; and you just cannot go back and start over.

For NES translators in Japan, unless you can acquire some of the relatively rare anglophone clients, sales-ready spoken Japanese is pretty much essential. My observations tell me that few translators who have been here for a decade or longer and have not yet acquired that level of spoken Japanese will find it easy; for many, it will be unreachable.

For beginners, the outlook is somewhat brighter, but some former common-sense expectations are no longer valid. Just learning Japanese and becoming a good translator will not assure you of a successful career doing translation.

Early building of human networks is important. Acquisition of field-specific expertise is very important, and one way to achieve that is to take a non-translation job in your proposed field of specialization; again, it’s having a life before translation. The particular way I did it is neither something I recommend nor something others should aspire to imitate, but I described it in an article in my parent website.