Tag: translation

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.

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.