Tag: Japan Association of Translators

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.

Emergency! Emergency! The Toolists are coming! Everybody to get from street!

Actually, they’re already here in large numbers.

Some translators continue to assert that AI can be useful to a translator as a tool to survive. And translation organizations—sadly even the ones ostensibly controlled by practictioners rather than agencies—are doing little to dissuade freelancers from this delusion.

These AI toolist translators and their organizations either don’t understand—I doubt that such stupidity is the reason—or find it too painful to admit that the long-standing structure of the translation business for freelancers effectively precludes almost all freelancers from effective survival strategies to enable them to continue translating, AI use or not, because the only clients most can acquire are already using AI to replace them. Other clients are essentially not available to most freelancers.

Specifically, although it shouldn’t even need to be mentioned at this point—go ahead and wonder why I mention it—the freelance translation world is a two-tiered brokered business, in which freelance translators don’t have (and many freelancers have enjoyed not having to have) access to and interaction with the entities that will not be using AI for at least a short while yet to replace them. Most of those entities are not in the translation business, although even they will become rarer as things progress.

Technologies introduced decades ago—I’m, of course, not talking about AI—welcomed and nurtured a population of freelance translators uniquely unsuited to survive. Remote work is one reason. That has enabled working isolated and protected from interaction with anyone who can judge qualifications and skills. Clients are allowed to believe that the translation process is a black box, although they are very often also led to believe that there are thousands of expert translators in the box, which they are not allowed to peek into.

Yet another aspect of the crisis is that the population of translators that was nurtured by technology that enabled remote work is one that is heavily populated by people who don’t like interacting with other human beings to start with. That is a death sentence in a situation where you need to develop clients other than those in the translation business, particularly those in Japan, although direct interaction with translation consumers, regardless of their location, is the best way to convince them that you’re just not another broker but an actual professional practitioner.

Faced with this environment, in-house work is arguably one survival path. That said, it most often requires being close to where the work is. Many people are not close to where the work is, and in fact may probably enjoy being distant from where the work is. Additionally, there will be not nearly enough in-house positions—and there are almost no in-house translator positions in translation companies—to satisfy people who wish to translate for a living.

The other path for people who can do it is to go back to school or somehow otherwise obtain a knowledge base and skill set that is not related to translation or language and would be the basis of a career even without translation. Translation and language alone are not going to provide a career path. That has ended, unless you wish to remain in academia and train yet more people who won’t have careers as translators waiting for them upon graduation.

In 2019, I made a substantial presentation at IJET-30 in Cairns on the theme of how to break out of the second tier, which works for translation-brokering agencies. At the time, however, I didn’t realize how prescient it was to turn out to be, now that freelancing on the second tier is no longer viable for people who want to continue translating.

Restoration of Content Probably Lost Forever Elsewhere

Having reached the reasonable conclusion that countless IJET Conference presentations (not just mine, but of many other volunteers to who spent the time and effort to present) before JAT abandoned publishing of IJET Proceedings and switched to videorecording of presentations have been lost or deleted from the JAT website, I have restored not only the full scan of the Proceedings of IJET-1 (Hakone 1990, where I did not present), but also my presentations at the following.

  • IJET-5 (Urayasu 1994)
  • IJET-7 (Yokohama 1996)
  • IJET-8 (Sheffield 1997)
  • IJET-9 (Yokohama 1998; not a lone presentation, but rather from comments I made in a panel discussion)
  • IJET-16 (Chicago 2005, kindly presented on my behalf by Manako Ihaya while was tied up interpreting here in Japan)
  • IJET-19 (Okinawa 2008)
  • IJET-27 (Sendai 2016)
  • IJET-30 (Cairns 2019)

I have placed links to all of the above at https://kirameki-translation.co.jp/forpros.html.

I will undertake to preserve these, as they are probably gone forever from the JAT website, not that they have much relevance at this stage (save for IJET-30, which turned out to be unexpectedly prescient, given the currently progressing demise of tier-two translators.