Tag: AI

AI Bubble Bursting? It Doesn’t Matter for translators.

Predictions that AI is a bubble that will shortly burst are becoming more common. These predictions appear to be not from investors, but rather mostly from people who stand to lose if AI succeeds.

The bubble for AI investors might indeed burst someday, but it is clear that AI has already succeeded in significantly reducing the need for translation brokers to purchase translations from professional translators, and the brokers are replacing professionals by using AI to create translations in-house, and then have them post-edited, mostly by former translators with no options. The result has been that many professionals have been left with little translation work, have been reduced to doing low-paid post-editing, or have simply left translation as a way of making a living. These outcomes are a measure of AI’s success.

Professional translators, rather than anticipating with joy the bursting of the AI bubble, should think about current ways to survive in their chosen field of endeavor, in which the work sources (translation-brokering agencies) for the majority of freelancers are already rapidly replacing professional translators with AI systems they use themselves.

Neither freelance translators nor their organizations are giving sufficient attention and thought to this situation. Their focus appears to be on pointing out the failings of AI or claiming without evidence that everything will be fine if translators just “adapt” to the new technology. It looks like translation organizations are not able to bring the hard realities to their members. It is clear that things will not be fine and, in fact, it is clear that the model of freelancers getting translation work from agencies has already largely crumbled. But those organizations are struggling to maintain the appearance of relevance as their member are losing actual relevance.

The boiling frogs need to hop out of the AI pot before it is too late.

Earth to ATA! Come in please!

The text cited below, regarding translation, but in a post by ATA on LinkedIn introducing an article on AI use for visual dubbing, is perhaps the most recklessly irresponsible thing that I’ve seen ATA say, albeit backhandedly, about the currently ongoing demise of human translators.

“Many believe that translation will be one of the first ones to go”? Yes, and they are correct. But the implication of the ATA statement is that translation will not go, and the ATA goes on to chant the commonly heard mantra of “it will just change the way we work.” Really? The reality is that the work is mostly gone for countless freelance translators already.

Is it just arrogance on the part of the ATA to think that people will believe this nonsense?

Is it that the people running the organization are so desperate to maintain their own relevance that they’re willing to deceive members with this batshit crazy take on the current existential crisis? Shame on the ATA and the people running it.

Translation has already gone away for most freelancers. It’s not something that will happen in the future, and it’s not a prediction. It’s gone for almost all freelance translators, and organizations like the ATA need to stop their irresponsible statements like this.

“Changing the way we work” is a cute way of not actually recognizing that human professionals are mostly now only being asked to perform tasks that pay so little that such work is in no way a replacement for the earnings that translation work brought professionals before translation-brokering agencies migrated to AI to eliminate the need to pay humans for translating.

The reasons that the translation-brokering agencies are able to succeed as they are succeeding in replacing humans for translation might be too painful for the ATA and many of its members to discuss. But those reasons need to be discussed and understood.

I can certainly imagine the desire on the part of the ATA directors must feel to maintain their relevance even as the relevance of their members slips rapidly away, but this aspirational delusion of the work just changing is simply disingenuous at best. It’s arguably deception by implication. Knock it off.

Many believe automation and AI will fully take over a wide array of professions, and that translation will be one of the first to go. While companies are definitely deploying AI for many tasks, more often it isn’t replacing jobs so much as changing the way we work—and what is possible.

Not with a bang but a whimper: Relevance is slipping away from translation organizations.

I have written in more detail about the rather bleak output for freelancers elsewhere, but here are a few disturbing observations of what translation organizations are doing lately.

A number of major translation organizations that say they support and look out for the interests of translators—the ones I have in mind are located on three continents are—to varying degrees, but all clearly to a considerable extent—promoting non-productive belief in delusions by their members.

  • They allow and even encourage freelancer members to think that adopting AI themselves is a strategy for survival, carefully avoiding mention that the use of AI won’t attract clients for freelancers as their agency clients replace them with AI, and that only a very small number of freelancers are able to acquire clients other than agencies, which are well on their way out as purchasers of translation from freelancers. Some of the organizations, amazingly, have even taken to running or sponsoring events that sell AI-related products, teach AI use, or (more surprisingly) discuss post-editing.
  • They either themselves fail to recognize or are afraid that their members will recognize that it is not possible to earn a realistic living by doing the non-translation task of post-editing AI output.
  • They continue to promote the idea that human translators will always be needed (correct, of course), but fail to mention (or fear that their members will themselves realize) that, yes, human translators will always be needed, but only 5 to 10 percent of the current population of freelancers will be needed, and that the net number of actually working translators—post-editing is not translation—will reach that level in the very near future.

The above-noted behavior by translation organizations is uniformed at best and arguably irresponsible. It masks unspoken and unspeakable distress, but also surely is aimed at preserving the relevance of the organizations and of the people running them, in spite of most of their members seeing their own relevance slip away at a pace that defies their efforts to survive.

It is time for translation organizations to get real, face what is happening, and level with their members, rather than feeding them comfortable-sounding pap. If they cannot do that, they should think about other potential trajectories for the organizations, the most suitable one at this point being one that reduces the yearly dues needed to be paid by freelancers to organizations to zero.