Tag: translation

Why am I still on LinkedIn?

I often post complaints here about LinkedIn and the behavior of people using the LinkedIn platform; things like all the charlatan coaches and plantation investment scam ads. So, why am I still on LinkedIn? One main reason is that there are few other options.

I am a professional translator, working from Japanese to English and also have done much interpreting. Japan Association of Translators, founded as the only organization of mostly non-literary translators in Japan that is not run by translation-brokering agencies, was formerly quite an active group of translators, mostly working in mainstream fields such as business, finance, technical/industrial, patents, and medical/pharmaceutical. When I was involved with JAT long ago, serving as the president a number of times, it had monthly face-to-face meetings with presentations by people mostly working in those fields, even though it had only a fraction of the current membership. The meetings were always followed by a social get-together nearby.

JAT was formed on a rainy third Saturday in March, 1985. Fast forward 40 years. The organization is pretty much inactive, although you would not know it for all the irrelevant handwaving JAT does to maintain the appearance of relevance.

The membership grew to over 800 several years ago but appears to be around 500-plus now, or at least as reported in what appears to be a statutorily required disclosure last year. But more serious than the loss of membership is the loss of activity and total change of focus.

JAT no longer has a vibrant schedule of in-person meetings dealing with core translation issues. In fact, it has no actual “JAT meetings.” It has things like:

  • on-line discussion of manga translation (very exciting, I am sure, to the people doing such work, but that’s only a tiny demand sector compared with the mainstream fields noted above);
  • promotion of anodyne discussions, mostly online, ignoring and diverting attention away from the ongoing existential crisis;
  • occasional social gatherings;
  • an international conference, held once every two years in Japan and in alternate years overseas (and when in Japan, not necessarily in Osaka or Tokyo areas, where most translators surely live, the one coming up shortly in Fukuoka being perhaps the last one in Japan, the way things are going in translation);
  • a translation contest for beginning translators;
  • an occasional event for book translators (mostly into Japanese since book translation in that direction far outweighs the volume of JA-EN book translation);
  • a website that is in disarray and from which large amounts of legacy content has been lost or deleted; and
  • almost no online interaction between members.

The last cited item—the failure to get members talking to each other—has gone on for years. JAT formerly had an active mailing list. It now has multiple web-based forums that are almost entirely devoid of posts from rank-and-file members. And JAT even went so far as to take the term “mailing list” out of its articles of incorporation, lest someone remind JAT that providing a mailing list was once a goal of the organization.

Suggestions that these problems should be corrected bring the inevitable “but JAT’s a volunteer organization” response. Yes, it’s a volunteer organization, and that is precisely why it behooves the current leadership of the organization to think about why people don’t volunteer.

The organization has become irrelevant to large numbers of translators. JAT has evolved into a group of translators remaining in the group or newly joining it who are interested in a small number of fields that do not and cannot support but a small number of translators. These members are apparently not interested in attending meetings, preferring rather to sit behind their keyboards and interact online. Numerous former members I know enjoyed the in-person meetings, which are mostly a thing of the past.

The translators who have traditionally been supported by work in fields other than ones that are the focus of most recent JAT activities have largely voted with their feet. JAT is no longer a “thing” to them. There are other games in town, but there are downsides to the other games.

I said above that there are few other options, and I had thought LinkedIn might be one for interaction with colleague JA-EN translators, but there is almost no activity by JA-EN translators that I have encountered.

Do JA-EN translators perhaps think that LinkedIn is a place they will find work? I hope not, because, with acquisition of direct clients being the best strategy for surviving AI (other than perhaps working in-house), LinkedIn is going to be practically meaningless for JA-EN translators looking for clients, particularly if they’re looking for Japanese clients, who are basically absent from LinkedIn.

Another other option is a fairly active Japanese-language-specific translators’ group on Facebook, a platform much more toxic than LinkedIn. It is awash with ads for prostitutes and countless anonymous, AI-generated engagement-harvesting pages created in places like Kosovo, Macedonia, and Pakistan.

Given the above situation, return to the cesspool of Facebook might be an answer, but it is a very painful way of returning to a place where you can interact with colleague JA-EN translators. Another strategy is simply to meet up with fellow translators outside of the structure of a foundering organization or online platform, and we have ten meeting up this coming Saturday, but mostly to eat and drink.

The Nature of Freelance Translating and Why it’s Coming to an End

[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Translation—including, of course, Japanese-to-English translation—is an almost entirely brokered service industry, in which freelance practitioners only rarely have any contact with the consumers of their deliverables and translation consumers are mostly prevented by agencies—for business reasons—from knowing even the name of the person who translated their documents.

Accordingly, it makes no difference that a professional translator might be better than AI, nor does it make any difference if a freelance translator uses AI themselves, because freelancer translation work sources, which are almost entirely agencies, are quickly moving away from ordering translation services from freelancers, and are instead themselves using MT (with or without the buzzword AI) followed by very low-paid post-editing. This post-editing is regularly being done by translators who have no options other than to ride out the storm, even though that storm is leading them into a storm drain.

There are perhaps several paths for freelancer survival, one being to compete with agencies for direct clients. Freelance translators and translators’ organizations studiously avoid discussing that topic in any meaningful and honest way.

For freelancers, it’s just too painful to think about how difficult it is to acquire direct clients; many surely and correctly realize it’s not possible for them. And for organizations, mention of the impending end to traditional freelance translating (actually largely here already) would be too harmful to their narrative of organizational relevance; what translation organization wants to present itself as an group of vulnerable members, most of whom are going to need to exit their chosen careers?

This leads to defensive delusions and denial behaviors and, on the part of organizations, anodyne discussion of topics that don’t meaningfully address the existential crisis facing agency-dependent freelancers. Rather than meaningful appraisal of the situation and suggestions of strategies, translators are treated to

  • reassurances that they are better than AI (true, but meaningless in a business sense),
  • suggestions to do things like market themselves in social media (meaningless for most freelancers and certainly useless for JA-EN translators in Japan), and
  • predictions that their clients will see the error of their ways and return (hopelessly delusional).

Despite all this posturing, it is ending for all but a tiny number of professional translators.

Replacement of professionals: It’s a business, and it’s working.

[I posted this originally on LinkedIn on March 20, 2025, but have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Freelance translators who continue to think that AI will not replace them as translators (but not as very low-paid post-editors) either

  • are among the tiny number of translators for whom that is true, or
  • are ignorant of the ongoing exit of translators or unwilling to realize that quality is not the only thing that matters in the translation business.

Translation is a business, and most of that business is progressing and apparently even growing without the need for carbon-based translators to do translation for agencies.

The overwhelming majority of translations that are paid for do not require creativity, cultural awareness, or any of the other qualities that humans can bring to the translation process when needed.

A large portion of Japanese-to-English translation requires field-specific knowledge and is not at all easy, but most of it is amenable to repair work done to AI output by low-paid post-editors. That approach is already proving to be successful.

Stories of horrified clients racing back to human translators are mostly aspirational and defensive delusions that run contrary to what is actually happening in the business. People who post such accounts or predictions would benefit from looking around at the real world, which is increasingly populated by translation consumers who are satisfied with the MTPE business model of their translation brokers.

Translators troubled by that should go out and compete with translation brokers for direct clients. That is one way to survive for at least a while anyway. But that’s not going to be possible for most translators.