Tag: survival

Replacement of Professional Translators by AI-using Translation Brokers: Some non-intuitive impact on what strategies are useful.

Seeing human professionals being rapidly replaced by technology in the translation process, translators are responding in various ways, but many of those ways involve using technology or being used by technology users.

There are the adaptists and the adoptists, the former essentially surrendering to mind-numbing post-editing tasks that pay ridiculously low, and the latter calling for pro-active use of AI by freelancers to translate. There is actually another group—it’s made up of optimists who believe that clients who value human translation will remain, which is arguably not a total falsehood, but they seem never to discuss what type of enlightened client they envision, nor do they think about how very few freelancers will be supportable by that quickly disappearing client demographic.

None of these groups seems to want to think about just who will purchase their translations after the only client group they have—it’s made up of almost exclusively of translation-brokering agencies—has totally disappeared, a situation which is well underway to becoming a reality.

It would be useful for the members of these groups of optimists of various types to do some thinking about how to develop clients that have not moved away from humans yet and might not move away for at least some time. Some time can still be bought, but not by simply doing the no-risk things that have become the norm in freelancer behavior.

At least here in Japan, but surely to a great extent elsewhere as well, developing those clients boils down to doing things that don’t involve much technology—in short, it amounts to having a life outside of your computer screen and your online presence as a translator.

Face-to-face encounters in Japan are much more likely to turn into orders than developing a killer profile on LinkedIn or having a killer website, neither of which has much sales value in Japan.

Sadly, getting a life is not an option for many freelancers, precisely because they have chosen a lifestyle—it would be wrong to characterize it as a business model—that provides a working environment that makes it difficult to get a life outside of waiting in front of your computer for work to arrive.

Rather than complaining and engaging in commiseration about post-editing rates or advocating surrender terms, the energies of freelancers and the groups that purport to represent their interests would be better spent thinking about actionable survival strategies that can be adopted.

The way things have developed, those strategies don’t need and are not helped much by using technology to develop a personal brand online or doing a whole variety of things proposed by people trying to avoid getting a life in real life or trying to pretend things will be just fine. They won’t for most freelancers.

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 practitioners 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.