Executive Summary: Japanese-to-English translation work is ending for almost all freelance translators, and working translators are not the only people who need to be concerned.
Many working professional JA-to-EN translators are accustomed to getting work from agencies and are seeing their translation work shrinking or disappearing with the appearance of much cheaper MT/AI solutions that are good enough for translation-brokering agencies and good enough for the agencies’ clients.
Some freelancers are clinging to hopes that AI will fail so badly that their work will return. I would urge such translators to do some more thinking, removing themselves from like-minded optimists and focusing on the real world outside of their echo chambers.
But it’s not just working freelancers who are going to be affected by the ongoing replacement of carbon-based professionals by computer code running in silicon-based hardware. There are also the people currently studying or thinking about studying Japanese with the hope to make translation a career.
I could be kind and say that the outlook for students learning Japanese is not bright, but such kindness won’t help them. The more precise truth is that the outlook is nearly hopeless for all but a tiny number of people currently learning Japanese with hopes of earning a living by translating. If their goal is a career translating for a living, they are learning Japanese several decades too late.
There are certainly good reasons to learn Japanese, but earning a living translating is no longer alone a justifiable reason for investing the time and expending the considerable effort required to join the rapidly shrinking ranks of professional translators able to earn a living translating.
Freelance translating has gone the way of John Cleese’s parrot; it is an ex-career for all but a very small number of potential translators. Japanese ability can be a useful addition to some other, solid specialization or qualification that could stand alone as sufficient to build a career on without Japanese ability. Japanese ability alone is not going to be that useful.
The ranks of newbies entering translation and some translators’ organizations appear to be shifting their interests to entertainment translation. There are, however, several pieces of bad news for people interested in things such as anime and game translation.
- The entertainment-related translation business is not immune to AI transformation. That has already started, and you can hear translators already moaning about it online.
- Those entertainment-related fields are very small compared to the demand for fields such as business/finance, technical/industrial, patent, and legal, which are being taken over by AI.
- Because of the popularity of entertainment content, competition has been fierce, making rates very low, compared to rates formerly common in the fields that are being largely taken over by AI.
- Competition for entertainment translation work will heat up even further as many more mainstream-field translators try to shift fields to survive.
Given the above, things like anime and game translation are not promising as a lucrative field for beginning translators, nor are they safe havens for out-of-work people from other translation fields.
Regardless of what field you are in, it’s ending, the only difference being the possibility of a buying time if you can acquire clients that don’t use AI. If we are talking about Japanese-to-English translation, that essentially means direct clients, meaning it is ending for almost all freelancers, for reasons that should be easy-to-understand for freelancers.
Both educational institutions and translators’ organizations (e.g., Japan Association of Translators and ATA) must work up the courage to recognize what is happening and appropriately and honestly counsel their students and members, respectively. To do anything else is simply self-serving and irresponsible.