Few industries have been hit by AI as hard as translation. Rates are plummeting. Work is drying up. Translators are considering abandoning the field, or bankruptcy. These are their stories.
Thanks for sharing our stories! Just a quick update: I was indeed forced out of the translation industry, and Iām now working in marketing as a bilingual copywriter. My boss even makes me use AI to speed things up (regardless of quality issues). Worst of all, he trusts everything ChatGPT says, and says that if I double-check the AI's copy or do my own research, Iām just wasting precious time.
These people grossly underestimate the problem of hallucinations. You should try to educate them about it. Let him use the system with no error checking with his name and reputation on it š
I find a lot of these types of people are not educable. If they go that extreme saying double-check the AI's output is wasting precious time, they clearly lack of critical thinking and the will to learn.
What I'm hearing from this is that the AI buzzword gave corporations an excuse to turn cultural products ā notably online content and video games ā into indistinct, barely intelligible mush. Really does seem like we're heading into the post literate age.
I majored in Translation, have a Master's in Translation Technologies and have been working in Localization/Translation management for over 10 years.
When I joined my current company (a tech company where I work as Localisation manager), I was able to cut costs without being asked to - by using freelance translators instead of agencies (which add a big markup) and implementing translation memories. I pay an above-the-market rate to my translators, who I have good relationships with, some of them for over 10 years.
Over the last 3 months, my managers keep pushing me to cut costs. As I read this piece, I have an Excel sheet open to see how to cut 30% of translation costs - and of course, "AI" needs to be involved somehow. Not because it's proven to be good at what it does (it isn't), but because it's a task the AI salespeople love showcasing, partially because it creates okay drafts sometimes, partially because only localization professionals can tell when a translation is bad.
I manage +30 languages. I speak 4 of these fluently, and other 6-7 I can "vaguely" QA. That's enough to tell that LLMs CANNOT be trusted with proper uncontrolled translation, of pretty much any content. They rarely commit grammar or spelling errors (they're LANGUAGE models after all), but they're inconsistent with themselves, they don't really follow prompts, they can't tell how many characters a sentence is: and of course, only a translator or localization person can tell.
I am in my mid 30s and, even if my job is "safe" for at least a year or two (they need someone to Copy and Paste the GPT output after all), I am already thinking of reskilling to a blue collar job. I will probably need to abandon the country that I love and where I moved to, go back to living with my family, take shit jobs, lose my "middle class" status, but I will be damned if I spend years of my life reskilling to be replaced by AI again or ever have to sit across a privately educated manager talking about KPIs, OKRs, career development.
I get really angry when I hear about this concept of translators being replaced because my job requires me to work with translations all the time and I specifically request human translation rather than machine translation (even with human supervision and redaction) because the latter sucks. If it happens that we need to use a machine, sometimes we have to look for a native speaker to go through the original text for us because we have zero clue what is going on. Give it a typo or any human error or slang and itās dunzo. Respect to all translators and I hope decision makers will soon realize that they need your work rather than half-assed machine produce.
As a translator, all of this is horribly familiar. But I feel that the point made about the "good enough" attitude spreading throughout the whole of society is the real key here. How much more stupid and accepting of slop can we get?
There's also the issue that the many pro-AI governments don't seem to have seen coming - how exactly does society survive when all these well-paid people can no longer contribute, but on the contrary need help from the social security system to survive? That applies not just to translators, but to developers, teachers, customer service staff, copywriters, editors, graphic designers... a whole swathe of society being suddenly made penniless. But of course this is all going to be outweighed by the benefits of AI ā to which nobody can actually point.
Thanks for this. I work as a freelance translator and have seen a significant drop in jobs/income this year, to the point where I'm actively looking for work outside my field. I've always refused to edit machine translations for all the reasons mentioned in your piece, and will continue to refuse to work with AI, for personal and ethical reasons.
This conversation reminded me of a story I wrote several months ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/noeliaamoedo/p/from-mikonos-to-ai-foundational-models. I wonder whether sharing more concrete examples of the nuance and depth lost with machine translations can move the needle on how people think, or at least, make some of those managers think twice.
"But what does the future hold for people like me? For the other 95% of the population who canāt afford to constantly reskill or upskill every couple of years just to keep up?" As a freelance writer who has been losing work to AI and making plans to change careers, this is the question I keep asking myself. Translation is such an impressive and critical skill - it's so upsetting to see what's happening to the field.
I'm a Japanese/English interpreter and translator. Unfortunately, for my language pair at least, I think ChatGPT and other LLMs have been a huge step forward in automated translation. Like night and day compared with deepL or google translate. It's actually dealt quite well with human errors, slang, and jargon, in my experience. Not as good as a seasoned pro, but with a non-specialized text, it may well deliver a better output than someone just starting out.
Do I think companies should hire AI translators instead of humans? Of course not. But to discount LLMs as no different than previous technology totally contradicts what I have seen, personally.
My heart is with all these folks, translation is an art form and thus a canary in the coal mine situation. The observations of āflattening,ā āloss of nuance and characterizationā should be alarming for all of us.
I've been working as a technical translator for 28 years, and at the beginning of the year I lost my largest contract to AI. For the past 4 years already the work has been changing from TEP to MTPE and now it's gone fully to AIPE. I still work for agencies, but it's mindnumbing just fixing AI hallucination or lack of subtlety and etc. I'm migrating to the publishing business, where no doubt AI will show it's face, but literature still is a more complicated beast for it. But it's bleak times for us.
I agree that AI struggles to translate literary texts, but breaking into that kind of translation is extremely difficult, or at least it has been for me. It's been a dream of mine for years but one I only pursued intermittently as it would have meant a big drop in income. Now I'd be happy with the comparative pittance that literary translation pays in Quebec!
The testimonies of translators in the OP are heartbreaking to read. At the moment, though, there might be a few industries where the flow may be going the other way. One is financial services, at least in certain niches such as the asset management and hedge fund space.
My wife and a colleague formed a boutique to service this area with translation about 12 years ago, after sheād had a long career on the operational side of that business in Japan. All her contractors also must have operational experience with some type of assets, e.g. bonds, equities, swaps, funds of funds, etc. Sheās seeing an uptick in orders after a short earlier decline, as clients are getting frustrated with MT work product.
Maybe other areas that require a lot of domain expertise can provide some glimmer of hope that human translation will still be valued by customers.
Many of the translators quoted in the article work freelance. One reason for choosing self-employment is that it suits people who are neurodivergent, as is the case with me. Being able to control everything in my work environment that affects my senses (amount of noise and light Iām exposed to, even the fabric of my office chair and the cleaning products used), as well as my workload, goes a long way towards making me happier and more productive.
I know that many people suffer from being unable to control their work environment and the workload theyāre obliged to deal with, but itās worse for neurodivergent people. Being a self-employed freelance translator hit the perfect sweet spot for me, but thatās a thing of the past now. At 63, I have only this one skill and Iām too old to retrain. As one commenter put it, Iāll have to sacrifice my middle-class status. However, after reading Brianās article and the related comments, at least I know Iām in good company!
I found this article in the ācuratorā newsletter Ten Tabs, and Iām glad I did. The article revealed an impact of AI that I couldnāt have imagined. And, that impact is of particular interest to me because in the 1960s Iād considered training to become a UN interpreter.
I have encountered assembly instructions, for products made in China, that were unintelligible. Perhaps AI translation was to blameā¦!
forget your political agenda for a second. this has nothing to do with gamegate....
and it's so much bigger than localization. Every type of text/media imaginable needs to be translated (medical, legal, technical, litterature, video, comics etc etc)
forget your political agenda for a second. this has nothing to do with gamegate....
and it's so much bigger than localization. Every type of text/media imaginable needs to be translated (medical, legal, technical, litterature, video, comics etc etc)
Thanks for sharing our stories! Just a quick update: I was indeed forced out of the translation industry, and Iām now working in marketing as a bilingual copywriter. My boss even makes me use AI to speed things up (regardless of quality issues). Worst of all, he trusts everything ChatGPT says, and says that if I double-check the AI's copy or do my own research, Iām just wasting precious time.
These people grossly underestimate the problem of hallucinations. You should try to educate them about it. Let him use the system with no error checking with his name and reputation on it š
I find a lot of these types of people are not educable. If they go that extreme saying double-check the AI's output is wasting precious time, they clearly lack of critical thinking and the will to learn.
What I'm hearing from this is that the AI buzzword gave corporations an excuse to turn cultural products ā notably online content and video games ā into indistinct, barely intelligible mush. Really does seem like we're heading into the post literate age.
I majored in Translation, have a Master's in Translation Technologies and have been working in Localization/Translation management for over 10 years.
When I joined my current company (a tech company where I work as Localisation manager), I was able to cut costs without being asked to - by using freelance translators instead of agencies (which add a big markup) and implementing translation memories. I pay an above-the-market rate to my translators, who I have good relationships with, some of them for over 10 years.
Over the last 3 months, my managers keep pushing me to cut costs. As I read this piece, I have an Excel sheet open to see how to cut 30% of translation costs - and of course, "AI" needs to be involved somehow. Not because it's proven to be good at what it does (it isn't), but because it's a task the AI salespeople love showcasing, partially because it creates okay drafts sometimes, partially because only localization professionals can tell when a translation is bad.
I manage +30 languages. I speak 4 of these fluently, and other 6-7 I can "vaguely" QA. That's enough to tell that LLMs CANNOT be trusted with proper uncontrolled translation, of pretty much any content. They rarely commit grammar or spelling errors (they're LANGUAGE models after all), but they're inconsistent with themselves, they don't really follow prompts, they can't tell how many characters a sentence is: and of course, only a translator or localization person can tell.
I am in my mid 30s and, even if my job is "safe" for at least a year or two (they need someone to Copy and Paste the GPT output after all), I am already thinking of reskilling to a blue collar job. I will probably need to abandon the country that I love and where I moved to, go back to living with my family, take shit jobs, lose my "middle class" status, but I will be damned if I spend years of my life reskilling to be replaced by AI again or ever have to sit across a privately educated manager talking about KPIs, OKRs, career development.
You obviously have an impressive ability to figure stuff out and manage things at a high level. Donāt let them sell you short!
I get really angry when I hear about this concept of translators being replaced because my job requires me to work with translations all the time and I specifically request human translation rather than machine translation (even with human supervision and redaction) because the latter sucks. If it happens that we need to use a machine, sometimes we have to look for a native speaker to go through the original text for us because we have zero clue what is going on. Give it a typo or any human error or slang and itās dunzo. Respect to all translators and I hope decision makers will soon realize that they need your work rather than half-assed machine produce.
As a translator, all of this is horribly familiar. But I feel that the point made about the "good enough" attitude spreading throughout the whole of society is the real key here. How much more stupid and accepting of slop can we get?
There's also the issue that the many pro-AI governments don't seem to have seen coming - how exactly does society survive when all these well-paid people can no longer contribute, but on the contrary need help from the social security system to survive? That applies not just to translators, but to developers, teachers, customer service staff, copywriters, editors, graphic designers... a whole swathe of society being suddenly made penniless. But of course this is all going to be outweighed by the benefits of AI ā to which nobody can actually point.
Katherine Kirby made a point that needs emphasizing: How can you have a consumer economy without consumers?
Thanks for this. I work as a freelance translator and have seen a significant drop in jobs/income this year, to the point where I'm actively looking for work outside my field. I've always refused to edit machine translations for all the reasons mentioned in your piece, and will continue to refuse to work with AI, for personal and ethical reasons.
This conversation reminded me of a story I wrote several months ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/noeliaamoedo/p/from-mikonos-to-ai-foundational-models. I wonder whether sharing more concrete examples of the nuance and depth lost with machine translations can move the needle on how people think, or at least, make some of those managers think twice.
"But what does the future hold for people like me? For the other 95% of the population who canāt afford to constantly reskill or upskill every couple of years just to keep up?" As a freelance writer who has been losing work to AI and making plans to change careers, this is the question I keep asking myself. Translation is such an impressive and critical skill - it's so upsetting to see what's happening to the field.
I'm a Japanese/English interpreter and translator. Unfortunately, for my language pair at least, I think ChatGPT and other LLMs have been a huge step forward in automated translation. Like night and day compared with deepL or google translate. It's actually dealt quite well with human errors, slang, and jargon, in my experience. Not as good as a seasoned pro, but with a non-specialized text, it may well deliver a better output than someone just starting out.
Do I think companies should hire AI translators instead of humans? Of course not. But to discount LLMs as no different than previous technology totally contradicts what I have seen, personally.
My heart is with all these folks, translation is an art form and thus a canary in the coal mine situation. The observations of āflattening,ā āloss of nuance and characterizationā should be alarming for all of us.
I've been working as a technical translator for 28 years, and at the beginning of the year I lost my largest contract to AI. For the past 4 years already the work has been changing from TEP to MTPE and now it's gone fully to AIPE. I still work for agencies, but it's mindnumbing just fixing AI hallucination or lack of subtlety and etc. I'm migrating to the publishing business, where no doubt AI will show it's face, but literature still is a more complicated beast for it. But it's bleak times for us.
I agree that AI struggles to translate literary texts, but breaking into that kind of translation is extremely difficult, or at least it has been for me. It's been a dream of mine for years but one I only pursued intermittently as it would have meant a big drop in income. Now I'd be happy with the comparative pittance that literary translation pays in Quebec!
I've been trying to break into the editorial industry for 3 years now, it's not easy...
Best of luck to you, and to all of us who are working hard to to keep our life's blood out of the #$%@ machine!
The testimonies of translators in the OP are heartbreaking to read. At the moment, though, there might be a few industries where the flow may be going the other way. One is financial services, at least in certain niches such as the asset management and hedge fund space.
My wife and a colleague formed a boutique to service this area with translation about 12 years ago, after sheād had a long career on the operational side of that business in Japan. All her contractors also must have operational experience with some type of assets, e.g. bonds, equities, swaps, funds of funds, etc. Sheās seeing an uptick in orders after a short earlier decline, as clients are getting frustrated with MT work product.
Maybe other areas that require a lot of domain expertise can provide some glimmer of hope that human translation will still be valued by customers.
Many of the translators quoted in the article work freelance. One reason for choosing self-employment is that it suits people who are neurodivergent, as is the case with me. Being able to control everything in my work environment that affects my senses (amount of noise and light Iām exposed to, even the fabric of my office chair and the cleaning products used), as well as my workload, goes a long way towards making me happier and more productive.
I know that many people suffer from being unable to control their work environment and the workload theyāre obliged to deal with, but itās worse for neurodivergent people. Being a self-employed freelance translator hit the perfect sweet spot for me, but thatās a thing of the past now. At 63, I have only this one skill and Iām too old to retrain. As one commenter put it, Iāll have to sacrifice my middle-class status. However, after reading Brianās article and the related comments, at least I know Iām in good company!
I found this article in the ācuratorā newsletter Ten Tabs, and Iām glad I did. The article revealed an impact of AI that I couldnāt have imagined. And, that impact is of particular interest to me because in the 1960s Iād considered training to become a UN interpreter.
I have encountered assembly instructions, for products made in China, that were unintelligible. Perhaps AI translation was to blameā¦!
Gamergate won. Eat shit localizers
forget your political agenda for a second. this has nothing to do with gamegate....
and it's so much bigger than localization. Every type of text/media imaginable needs to be translated (medical, legal, technical, litterature, video, comics etc etc)
forget your political agenda for a second. this has nothing to do with gamegate....
and it's so much bigger than localization. Every type of text/media imaginable needs to be translated (medical, legal, technical, litterature, video, comics etc etc)