Category: For Translators & Interpreters

For professional translators, mainly Japanese-English translators.

With a few lifeboats still available, too many translators are both cursing and holding onto a sinking ship.

Numerous translators are actively discussing in various online venues the problems with AI translation and are saying that clients will come back to them when they discover the problems of AI. Although these discussions provide opportunities for bonding among colleagues, they serve no other identifiable purpose, and they certainly do nothing to impede the obvious headlong race into a world in which translation is viewed as a commodity by both translation brokers and their translation-consuming clients.

The underlying, persistent reality is that translation is a business.

The amount of money translation brokers have needed to pay translations they purchase for resale has been a constant profit-diluting annoyance to the LSB (language service broker) community. In response, brokers have employed numerous devices over the years to lower their translation purchase price. One device is the mandatory use of broker-specified CAT tools, with an accompanying discounting of rates that can be received by translators. Another is forcing translators to work on hamster-wheel online translation platforms in order to receive work.

But now the brokers on which most translators depend have a new way to lower (or almost eliminate) the cost of obtaining translations to sell, this being the elimination of professional translators from the translation process step.

And there is abundant evidence that they are succeeding at doing just that.

One reason for the brokers’ success is that the good-enough paradigm has been widely adopted and is working for a huge portion of the translation market.

Another reason is more serious for freelance translators and needs to be recognized by translators wishing to survive:

Brokers conduct themselves based on the correct understanding that very few translators from which they purchase translations can compete with them in acquiring direct clients themselves. Most translators don’t even know who their potential direct clients are. And, even if they do know, they generally don’t know who to approach at those clients or how to approach them. Many, for a variety of reasons, do not have the ability to access potential direct clients.

The adoption of AI by brokers succeeds largely by the monetization of their control of customers, combined with the inability of most translators to compete with brokers. It succeeds because good enough is good enough and, more critically, because most translators are trapped, with little ability to compete with brokers and no alternative income-earning path.

To survive by translating for earnings anywhere near what they previously could expect to earn, translators will need to acquire direct clients. For most translators, that will not be possible.

That is where broker-dependent freelance translators are, and it is essentially the end of the road for most translators wishing to pursue translation as a way to earn a living.

矮 in the world is this happening? All dwarfs are not created (or translated) equally.

In the field of astronomy, the term dwarf star has a long history. That history dates back far before the word police would raise their eyebrows and raise a fuss about dwarf being offensive.

That history has followed the term into the Japanese language, where the expression 矮星 has long been used and is still used to refer to dwarf stars, including on numerous pages of the website of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

In the age of the word police, however, the demotion of Pluto to the status of dwarf planet presented an opportunity for the authorities (at least here in Japan) to make allow the politics of correctness to intrude into language. The result is that the term is treated differently between Japanese and English.

Whereas 矮星 is accepted for dwarf star in Japanese, 矮惑星 for dwarf planet is avoided, surely for fear that the word police would coming knocking on the door of offensive transgressors. The NAOJ website gives a nod to the dwarf planet use in English, but avoids mention of 矮惑星 in Japanese, preferring to use the safer English term dwarf planet in running Japanese text, rather than use the dreaded 矮 character.

One example, from a FAQ page of the NAOJ website:

太陽系のdwarf planetとは、「太陽の周りを回り」「十分大きな質量を持つために自己重力が固体としての力よりも勝る結果、重力平衡形状（ほぼ球状）を持ち」「その軌道近くから他の天体が排除されていない」「衛星でない」天体である。

[from https://www.nao.ac.jp/faq/a0508.html]

Another method used to avoid 矮 is to call these dwarf planets 準惑星.

I guess the only thing that language realists can be thankful for is that the language revisionists have not banned 矮星 for dwarf star, but perhaps the day will come when we will see that character banned in dwarf stars as well. Time will tell.

Choosing what feels good is useful in avoiding facing what is true.

Adopting AI into your translation workflow is fine if it helps a translator and it provides a wonderfully anodyne topic for a conference presentation, while avoiding talking about the more serious challenges faced by freelance translators. But adopting AI will not get you work or be a survival solution if you are dependent on brokers for your translation work.

Although we would never drop a customer document into an AI system and then attempt to repair it, for very good reasons, the translation brokers that most translators depend on for translation work are well into their shift to looking for only post-editors. They pay peanuts and you cannot live on peanuts unless…