Tag: ATA

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.

Have not much to say? Create content instead.

Not so many years ago, before problems were reinvented as issues, services as solutions, and jobs as roles, people who had something to say would sometimes write those things.

These days, people increasingly identify as “content creators,” but some of this trendy content creation strikes me as aiming to obviate the need to have something to say. Just create “content” instead; it’ll make you “stand out.” And some of the people identifying as content creators don’t seem to have much to say, or to write, or to “create.”

The American Translators Association a short while ago promoted a webinar aimed at helping translators write translation content. Well, at least their choice of the verb write is refreshing. For members, it was just USD 45 for the hour-long webinar.

The webinar was billed as helping translators find what topics to write about. Don’t they know? Is that really necessary? We are often told to write about what we know. Does that mean…?

Perhaps it is aimed at translators who have so much to say they cannot decide what to write about, or perhaps it’s for those who have nothing to say. I’ll let you guess which.

This “translation content” is described as giving you visibility and as being good for marketing. Perhaps, but it sounds like participants are going to be told things they should have been able to figure out on their own. Perhaps more importantly, just who is the “translation content” intended for?

It was only USD 45 for the hour-long webinar, but with no indicated limit on the number of participants, if you get my drift. Perhaps ATA should run a webinar for USD 45 to teach participants how to run webinars for USD 45. That might be a better strategy than creating…uh, writing content.