Tag: post-editing

Earth to ATA! Come in please!

The text cited below, regarding translation, but in a post by ATA on LinkedIn introducing an article on AI use for visual dubbing, is perhaps the most recklessly irresponsible thing that I’ve seen ATA say, albeit backhandedly, about the currently ongoing demise of human translators.

“Many believe that translation will be one of the first ones to go”? Yes, and they are correct. But the implication of the ATA statement is that translation will not go, and the ATA goes on to chant the commonly heard mantra of “it will just change the way we work.” Really? The reality is that the work is mostly gone for countless freelance translators already.

Is it just arrogance on the part of the ATA to think that people will believe this nonsense?

Is it that the people running the organization are so desperate to maintain their own relevance that they’re willing to deceive members with this batshit crazy take on the current existential crisis? Shame on the ATA and the people running it.

Translation has already gone away for most freelancers. It’s not something that will happen in the future, and it’s not a prediction. It’s gone for almost all freelance translators, and organizations like the ATA need to stop their irresponsible statements like this.

“Changing the way we work” is a cute way of not actually recognizing that human professionals are mostly now only being asked to perform tasks that pay so little that such work is in no way a replacement for the earnings that translation work brought professionals before translation-brokering agencies migrated to AI to eliminate the need to pay humans for translating.

The reasons that the translation-brokering agencies are able to succeed as they are succeeding in replacing humans for translation might be too painful for the ATA and many of its members to discuss. But those reasons need to be discussed and understood.

I can certainly imagine the desire on the part of the ATA directors must feel to maintain their relevance even as the relevance of their members slips rapidly away, but this aspirational delusion of the work just changing is simply disingenuous at best. It’s arguably deception by implication. Knock it off.

Many believe automation and AI will fully take over a wide array of professions, and that translation will be one of the first to go. While companies are definitely deploying AI for many tasks, more often it isn’t replacing jobs so much as changing the way we work—and what is possible.

It’s time for agency-dependent freelance translators to face reality.

At the risk of accusations of having gone over to the dark side, I need to say that translators should accept the reality that the Japanese-to-English translation work that has supplied livelihoods to the great majority of freelance translators is now being handled quite satisfactorily (as determined by the paying clients, of course, not translators) by AI translation combined with editing done by former translators at very low rates.

The resulting cost is just a fraction of what it used to be, and this business model will succeed for at least a decade or two as is, with the help of currently idle translators, because a sufficient number thereof have no other career paths, but still have bills to pay.

Even after that, of course, there will be a continuing influx of Japanophilic language learners who are not aware of the real world of translation before they reach that real world and might not accept the reality of it even after they arrive there. That labor supply will continue to enable the above-noted business model. There won’t be a return to the old paradigm.

But even before the Japanophilic beginners take over post-editing from the dwindling supply of professional translators formerly working in mainstream demand fields, many translation consumers will themselves be doing AI translation and editing in-house.

That next stage of the transformation is already underway, as numerous translators continue to believe that things will work out, claiming that humans will always be needed to provide “cultural nuances.” The reality, however, is that only a tiny portion of translation that is paid for has anything to do with culture, and the parts that do can be fixed by very low-paid post-editors, at this stage meaning former translators who have no choice but to bite the low-paid post-editing bullet.

Denials, delusions, and occasional counter-indicative success stories aside, an evidence-based evaluation of where things actually already are points to exactly the above picture. The evidence?

  • Specific known translators forced to leave;
  • laughable rates paid to be the “human in the loop;”
  • the major translation sellers that control most clients and countless new translation-selling startups offering “human-in-the-loop” AI translation as their main service;
  • a paucity of translation work offered on even sleazy click-work reverse-auction platforms, which are now filled with very low-paid post-editing work;
  • no evidence of either a return to human professionals or dire AI translation-caused consequences, other than unverifiable anecdotes and aspirational, wishful-thinking predictions; and
  • a significant reduction and demographic transformation of the membership of the formerly most active group of JA/EN translation practitioners in Japan.

And there’s much more evidence from the real world, divorced from the aspirational predictions of survival made by people who hang out at the Denial & Delusion Café.

The above is not a pretty picture, but it is real, and you don’t have to wait for it to come to your neighborhood; it’s at your doorstep, if it’s not already in your kitchen eating your lunch.

Let’s get real.

Every day in every way it’s getting sillier and sillier to think that learning Japanese with the goal of earning a living by translating is a good strategy.

Universities are surely not teaching Japanese students aiming at translating for a living what’s waiting for them when they get out of school, because it’s not very much, and it’s very unlikely to be anything approaching what could be called translation. It would, naturally, not be in the interest of universities to turn off students with the grim truth.

Post-editing AI-generated translation—most of what “linguists” are being offered to do for peanuts—is as much translating as tightening bolts on a car before final delivery is “manufacturing cars.” And the idea that it will be faster and therefore compensate for the drastic reduction in rates is simply not informed by the reality. That reality is that translation sellers know they can get away with offering very low earning potential for post-editing, thanks to a ready and essentially captive labor supply of former translators with few other options and bills to pay.

Translators’ organizations appear to be at least tacitly going along with the delusion that things might get better for translators or at least won’t totally collapse, because “humans will always be needed” (loose bolts remain for low-paid labor to tighten).

The reality, however, is that things are already collapsing for large numbers of agency-dependent freelance translators.

People need to discard aspirational rationalizations and delusions, recognize what is actually happening, and act accordingly. And that does not realistically involve continuing to chase after a career that exists for only a tiny portion of extremely fortunate people. Freelance translating has essentially ended. Let’s get real about it.