I notice that numerous translation sellers offering “MTPE work” on their click-work platforms or on commercially provided reverse-auction platforms such as ProZ are attempting to categorize post-editing as “translation” or saying they’re looking for translators. This has also sometimes been the case on the JAT Job Board, but that might be because editing or post-editing cannot be selected when you post a job and, to be fair, some have said “Translation (MTPE),” but that is still incorrect, considering the task being described and the payment being assumed acceptable.
This looks like just the next step in agencies grooming their essentially captive labor supply to accept the new order.
Although I’ve never done or been asked to do post-editing of machine-translated output, I hear many people say it requires the skill of a translator. I can certainly believe that, and that might be even more the case recently, given the deceptively human-like English quality produced by AI.
As a task, however, post-editing is not translation, and it doesn’t come with an earning potential anywhere near what performing the task of translation provided to freelancers in the past.
Post-editing is no more translation than editing and rewriting Japanese-to-English translations decades ago was translation. Many people doing it then, however, aspired to become translators who actually get to do translation and be paid for translation, and many did achieve that goal. That will not be the case with the vast majority of people who do post-editing now, either to survive mid-career or because they think it’s a stepping stone to translation. It is not, and for most translators post-editing is at best a survival job for people not in a position to reinvent themselves.
The places needing post-editing realize they don’t need to provide much earning potential because of the continued availability of a captive labor supply with not many options. If they did need to provide anywhere near the earning potential of the past, there would be not much reason for them to adopt AI.
Because of the age demographics of the translator population, this situation should continue for at least a decade or two; after that, it’s difficult to tell where things will go, but it won’t matter to mid-career translators currently facing this situation, because for them the possibility of translating for a living will have ended.
All of that uncomfortable reality aside, I wish people would stop calling post-editing of MT/AI output translation, and also wish they would realize that calling a post-editor or even a translator a “linguist” has never put money in their bank account, and that most translators would rather have the money and the job satisfaction than the bloated title.