Tag: business

The Church of LinkedIn

I am exceedingly tired of LinkedIn.

It is awash with phoniness, including that of coaches preying on desperate LinkedIn users searching for “LinkedIn” success.

And I’m tired of the delusions that in general proliferate on LinkedIn.

I am tired of people who are addicted to LinkedIn and are believers in the myth that posting on LinkedIn will somehow bring them something good. Only their own efforts will bring them good, and they need to make those efforts in places other than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn itself is a delusion, and the disturbing reality is that the delusion called LinkedIn has been bought into by a frightening number of people.

I guess people want to “believe” in something. LinkedIn is sort of a religion that gives them something to believe in without having to ask for evidence. If you need that, go for it. I prefer the evidence-based real world beyond my computer screen.

Replacement of professionals: It’s a business, and it’s working.

[I posted this originally on LinkedIn on March 20, 2025, but have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Freelance translators who continue to think that AI will not replace them as translators (but not as very low-paid post-editors) either

  • are among the tiny number of translators for whom that is true, or
  • are ignorant of the ongoing exit of translators or unwilling to realize that quality is not the only thing that matters in the translation business.

Translation is a business, and most of that business is progressing and apparently even growing without the need for carbon-based translators to do translation for agencies.

The overwhelming majority of translations that are paid for do not require creativity, cultural awareness, or any of the other qualities that humans can bring to the translation process when needed.

A large portion of Japanese-to-English translation requires field-specific knowledge and is not at all easy, but most of it is amenable to repair work done to AI output by low-paid post-editors. That approach is already proving to be successful.

Stories of horrified clients racing back to human translators are mostly aspirational and defensive delusions that run contrary to what is actually happening in the business. People who post such accounts or predictions would benefit from looking around at the real world, which is increasingly populated by translation consumers who are satisfied with the MTPE business model of their translation brokers.

Translators troubled by that should go out and compete with translation brokers for direct clients. That is one way to survive for at least a while anyway. But that’s not going to be possible for most translators.

Two Translation Truths Revisited

Executive Summary: Freelance translation is ending as a way to make a living, having already ended for many, and nothing I can do or say will prevent that. The very few freelance translators who will survive will be able to do it on their own, without my advice. The ones who will not survive need to look elsewhere.

Two truths:

  • AI translation is not yet as good as professional translation by humans and
  • Clients will not come back after they start using AI.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Predictions of what is going to happen to the translation profession because of AI are meaningless, because it has already happened to a large extent.

This has seriously affected the livelihoods of countless translators who have for decades been doing the heavy lifting in the fields with high translation demand—finance, business, medical, pharmaceutical, technical/industrial of all types, patent, and legal.

Not knowing or admitting when things are coming to an end didn’t help the people on the Titanic, and—with the possible exception of the small number of translators working in several low-demand fields (such as anime, manga, and other entertainment fields, which are tiny compared to the above-noted high-demand fields)—translators need to realize and admit that the freelance translation ship has already hit the AI iceberg, and should realize that the organizations that they pay dues to are complicit in the studious avoidance of discussing the AI iceberg. Surely they wish to maintain the appearance of relevance for their members and also themselves, but that behavior is self-serving and irresponsible, and I might write a bit more about that shortly.

A while back I planned to write a considerable number of new articles aimed at colleague translators working in those high-demand fields that are going away, and I had written some already and readied other legacy articles for republishing.

There were articles having to do with the actual practice of translation and others having to do with strategies for survival.

That doesn’t make sense anymore.

But being a good translator is not sufficient to survive, and useful survival strategies can be implemented only by people who would have been able to survive without advice from me.

Those who will leave or agree to do low-paid repair work are mostly those who don’t have what it takes to deal with anything but agencies already using AI or who are in circumstances that hinder survival efforts. This can be for a number of reasons, including:

  • Early life decisions (for example, place of residence)
  • Level of field-specific knowledge (translation consumers are not impressed that you can Google for terminology, because it means you don’t understand their documents and their subject matter)
  • Aversion to selling, and (particularly for JA-EN translators in Japan)
  • Japanese speaking ability

It’s ending. No, wait, that’s wrong. It has already ended for most.