Tag: translation

Shameful and non-shameful use of AI

I don’t use AI when translating documents for clients, for the simply reason that I don’t need AI to translate, I don’t like the translations it produces, and I’m the translator I present to my client as the person who cares about and will execute the translations of their documents. Using AI would be a betrayal.

Translation-brokering agencies, which are well along in their replacement of human professionals with AI—and that leaves former translators with only extremely low-paid and mind-numbing post-editing work—are in a different situation.

The reason is simple. Almost all translation that is paid for by translation consumers is done by entities that are not themselves involved in executing translations, beyond purchasing the translations and then, if necessary, purchasing editing thereof before selling them. That is the case now, and it has been the case for many years, from long before humans found themselves being replaced by AI. Since entities that sell translation are only very rarely involved in doing translations, it makes sense for them to move away from expensive human professionals, and they are succeeding in that move.

Top Page of my company website

That said, for a process or task that I do not purport to do myself or sell to clients as a practitioner, I am more willing to use AI. If you look in the upper-right corner of my company website pages, you will see a hamburger menu icon. I have manually written the HTML for my considerable number of webpages for many years, resisting adding such a feature, not understanding how to do it, either with or without JavaScript. I gave in the other day and used Claude.ai to build that feature into my website. It took less than three minutes to obtain the required patch of html markup and the associated JavaScript, required no cash outlay, and it gave me what I needed with just a plain-language prompt of about three lines describing what I wanted.

There is a putative environmental impact—it is much smaller, of course, than the impact resulting from building a fake video of a deceased celebrity or a dancing cat—but I am not at all ashamed I did that. That would not be the case if I were in the business of selling webpage designs.

Returning to translation, the translations I do are mine and will continue that way, as I continue to resist the mindless rush into a world where translators surrender to AI-using brokers and professionals of all sorts outsource not only their writing but also their thinking to a collection of software commands. That’s not my style, and I cannot see that changing anytime soon.

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.