Tag: AI

Expanded Thoughts on My “LinkedIn Experience”

Executive Summary:  For any freelancer (and not limited to translators) not totally locked into sitting in front of their computer and hoping work arrives, LinkedIn is as useless as tits on a bull. In fact, even (and perhaps particularly) if you are locked into that strategy, LinkedIn is pretty much useless.

Some uselessness of LinkedIn not directly attributable to Microsoft:

  • Usage of LinkedIn by Japanese individuals and entities is tiny compared to the anglophone world, hence the small number of JA-EN translators I encountered there. One of the reasons I rejoined LinkedIn was because of the lack of online venues with active interaction between Japanese/English translators. LinkedIn did not fill that need.
  • Almost all of the hundreds of connection requests I received (and almost universally ignored) were from people in the Global South, some of them involved in activities not easily discernible from their profiles, but many being translators. Surely, they saw my profile and company name and erroneously thought I had translation work to give them; I do not.

Uselessness of LinkedIn directly attributable to Microsoft and its business model:

  • Countless ads for AI systems.
  • Countless ads for jobs training AI systems by annotating data.
  • Many ads for training you to achieve “AI success” by learning how to prompt AI.
  • Incessant promotion by Microsoft itself of AI and AI promoters.
  • Phoniness and bluster are everywhere and rewarded by Microsoft with reach that leads to engagement. These are characteristically from people claiming to be the best things since sliced bread and also fighting against tremendous odds and never losing. I feel some of these people have serious self-confidence problems, but I digress.
  • AI-generated posts clearly uploaded to farm engagement and often about topics totally unrelated to anything the poster’s profile might indicate that they do when they are not posting AI slop.

Uselessness of LinkedIn attributable to general users:

  • A large portion of users present themselves as consultants, coaches, and trainers.
  • Countless formulaic posts, many starting with the overworked expression of thrill, excitement, or honor about just about anything and everything. They often end with silliness such as “Hi, I’m Danny Deluder, and if you need…”
  • An increasing number of posts that include images stolen and unlawfully republished, probably by people who will conveniently tell you that the image was on the Internet, so it was “public domain.” These people should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a heavy shovel, but I digress.
  • Account owners who reply to every comment to a post they make using AI, easily discoverable from not only the vapid text, but also the lengths of the responses, the dispersion of which often no more than one or two words. It’s as if they told an AI to reply in N words.
  • Incessant posts from “LinkedIn coaches,” purporting to coach you in achieving “LinkedIn success.”
  • Countless posts by people self-identifying as

Uselessness and annoyance of LinkedIn attributable to translator users:

  • Many desperate and delusional translators chanting the “culture mantra,” which claims that, because translation requires an understanding of cultural nuances, humans will not be replaced by AI. These people apparently don’t know or want to know that most translation that is purchased is not affected by culture. Bless their hearts, but I have given up on trying to educate these people.
  • Ads by translators working the aisles of desperate translators and looking to take money from them for coaching.

Annoyance of a specific group related to business in Japan:

  • There is a Japan business group that has a few members who know about Japan and make sensible comments based on the real world, but almost all of the many thousands of members (over 15,000 if I remember correctly) are silent, and the group appears to be generally populated by non-Japanese looking to do business in Japan or, in many cases, just get a cover story to be able to come and live in Japan.
  • Because of the above demographic, there are Japanese members of the group selling services to foreigners trying to acquire visas or residence status in Japan.
  • Again, because of the above demographic, there are complaints that Japan is not fair to foreigners, including some comments about the unfairness of requiring proficiency in Japanese to gain employment. I will write about that particular silly entitlement at another time.

For translators specifically, I can say that, with translation quickly winding down as a realistic activity for most freelancers, the type of clients the few survivable translators will need to acquire are not going to be acquired by having a LinkedIn account or posting there. Many more—and much different—things are going to be required.

And just when I thought people couldn’t get any dumber…

Someone actually wrote this in a public post on the LinkedIn social media platform (and it is a social media platform):

And now, I feel like NOT using AI to help you edit, tighten ‘grafs or offer a reality check is sort of like using a typewriter when everyone else is using a Word Processor or Word Perfect or MS Word.

Asking AI to do a reality check? This is a breathtakingly dumb thing to say in an attempt to demonstrate that the author is “embracing” the technology.

Front-loaded Quality: Not much back then, and nothing much has changed.

In Japanese-to-English translation, the need to cut costs and the long-held folk beliefs by some native Japanese speakers have often taken precedence over the value of front-loading quality into the translation process.

Back in the late 1970s, most Japanese-to-English translation was done by native Japanese speakers (NJSs), with varying degrees of ability to translate and to write in usable English. There is strong evidence that the demographic makeup of at least the humans still translating remains largely the same, particularly when you consider in-house translators in Japanese entities.

Those translations were often then subjected to what was then (and even now, apparently) called a “native check,” which very often, particularly back then, was characterized as a “brush up” performed by a native English speaker (NES) who would sometimes not be Japanese-capable, making referring to the source text impossible and meaningless. The salient characteristic of this workflow was that frontloading of quality was not part of the translation process. Quick and cheap, followed by repair was the norm.

Numerous hapless foreigners were employed in such work in Japan, some were English teachers, others were recruited from among in-house foreigners working in Japanese companies, but who were not necessarily hired as translators or editors. They just had the misfortune to be standing around when a translation needed a “native check.”

As they became more numerous, NES translators started receiving more JA-EN translation work. There was still, however, a lingering uneasiness among many Japanese clients that a non-Japanese person couldn’t actually understand all the nuances of something written in Japanese. And could they really read the characters? I have been asked as much at translation conferences, even after it was clear that I am a JA-EN translator. One such encounter happened when I attended a translation gathering of the Japan Translation Federation as the head of Japan Association of Translators.

Perhaps more importantly as a business reality, however, NES translators were considerably more expensive than their NJS counterparts, so the process of making a rough translation and having it repaired continued for years. Again, front-loading of quality took a back seat to other concerns.

Decades went by and the number of NES translators who could convince clients of their capabilities gradually grew.

Enter machine translation, years before the AI hype. This gradually turned many translation opportunities for freelancers into opportunities to repair not poor translations done by an NJS human, but rather the output of an MT system, resulting in their earnings tanking even further, as translation consumers demanded cost cutting.

What is happening is that professional humans are being replaced in the translation process by collections of software commands with insufficiencies that are supposed to be fixed by professional humans, but at a fraction of the earnings that were possible when those humans were still being trusted to translate. Post-editing repair crews come to the rescue. Many translators are not eager to take on such work, but numerous translators have few other options, particularly ones in mid-career or later. And that is where freelance translation sits as I write this.