Tag: agency

Wishful Thinking and Delusions

I keep seeing wishfully thinking freelance translators saying that clients will come back to them when they realize how bad AI translations are. My observations of the real world are quite different.

  • As agency clients of freelancers migrate to using AI themselves to do translations extremely cheaply and quickly for their clients, they will not be returning to freelancers for translation, and freelancers will either be driven out of translating for a living or accept drastically reduced expectations of earnings.
  • If translation consumers use agencies that employ AI to do translation for them extremely cheaply and quickly (they have already started), they will not return to or engage with agencies still using professional translators, and those professional-using agencies will no longer be around to support the livelihoods of professional translators.

Both the above are clearly already in progress in the translation industry, and it is clearly a translation industry.

Quality is not an issue, because quality is good enough when it is cheap enough and fast enough. Once quality expections are lowered, they will resist being restored to previous levels.

If you avoid wishful thinking and delusions about where things are going in the near future—and where they currently are for many practitioners—the picture comes into focus.

Tough words, perhaps, but life’s tough, and then they expect you to post-edit.

Chickens are not egg collaborators.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 28, 2025]

Freelance translators need to stop “collaborating.”

A translator who sells a translation to a translation-brokering agency is no more “collaborating” with the agency (and the agency with them) than a chicken is collaborating with a supermarket when its eggs are sold to the supermarket for resale.

The supermarket has no chickens themselves and nobody at the supermarket is capable of laying eggs. Added to that is their lack of ability to improve the quality of eggs they purchase for resale and we have an airtight case against the use of the word collaboration for what goes on in the egg business and in the translation business.

In the brokered translation business as well, the broker’s lack of translation ability and frequent lack of ability even to judge and fix quality problems without also outsourcing those tasks both are evidence of the erroneous use of collaboration to describe what is happening.

The feel-good term collaboration has been adopted by many translators from the narrative used by agencies in the hope that the translators from whom they purchase translations for resale will erroneously think that they are equals. They are not, because they don’t have translation consumer clients, which are going to be an important survival strategy for some translators.

Many others choose to believe the unwarranted optimism of thinking that AI won’t replace them, but most will need to sit and post-edit until they are totally replaced. Some have already been replaced.

The first step in regaining your agency is to stop sounding like you are collaborating with agencies, because you are not.

It might be helpful to look at the etymology of the term collaboration.

After freelancers graduate from collaborating, they might consider distancing themselves from being “linguists” that accept “projects,” two more terms in the broker narrative that are not heard from direct clients, which is where the few translators who will survive need to focus.