{"id":1859,"date":"2026-07-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/?p=1859"},"modified":"2026-07-04T13:05:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:05:39","slug":"the-cultural-nuance-card-played-by-precarious-freelancers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/?p=1859","title":{"rendered":"The Cultural Nuance Card Played by Precarious Freelancers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Freelance translators are often heard these days warning users of AI for translation that human translators are needed to provide understanding of cultural nuances. While this assertion is certainly correct if the assumed enemy is raw AI not touched by the vaunted human-in-the-loop, that mode of translation is a strawman argument. Firstly, the human-in-the-loop is likely a desperate former translator trying to survive and willing to try to catch things that have gone wrong because of AI use. There is little evidence that this is not working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More importantly and more significantly, however, for mainstream freelance translators is the reality that only a tiny portion of translation that supports human translators has anything to do with or is affected by the &#8220;cultural nuances&#8221; so often mentioned by at-risk translators emphasizing what they alone can bring to the translation process. The subject matter requiring cultural understanding is in the quite limited, in terms of volume, fields of marketing and entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The boring truth of the translation business is that the overwhelmingly huge portion of translation that is paid for consists of difficult-to-translate and boring (to most people) texts about non-cultural things needed for things in legal, patent and other technical, business\/finance, medical, pharmaceutical, and many other fields. There is not a cultural nuance in sight in things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>a 25-page contract for a solar power generation facility being built for a manufacturer,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a statutorily required shareholders meeting notification running 40 pages and covering complex business and technical issues facing a major company,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>1400 pages of documents recording a police investigation of a sex crime, replete with DNA profiling reports and over 100 pages of photos with lines and arrows and a paragraph on the back telling what each one is (apologies to Arlo Guthrie),<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a patent for an ion chromatography system, or<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a complex specification for a system that senses the size of raindrops falling on an automobile windshield and adjusts the speed and operating mode of the windshield wipers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are the kinds of translation work that have supported countless freelance translators before the appearance of, and use by translation brokers of AI took it away from professionals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the vast majority of translation work that has been available to freelancers from agencies, the cultural nuance argument simply doesn&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Freelance translators are often heard these days warning users of AI for translation that human translators are needed to provide understanding of cultural nuances. While this assertion is certainly correct if the assumed enemy is raw AI not touched by the vaunted human-in-the-loop, that mode of translation is a strawman argument. Firstly, the human-in-the-loop is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/?p=1859\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Cultural Nuance Card Played by Precarious Freelancers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[59,22,134,277,6],"class_list":["post-1859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-colleague-professionals","tag-agency","tag-ai","tag-culture","tag-precarious","tag-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1859"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1864,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions\/1864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirameki-translation.co.jp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}