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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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There's at least one user (@ArjinFerman) who has said they use me and my professional career as a translator as an indicator of whether AI is making us useless or not. While I myself am no longer at all confident about the future of this profession (and neither are basically any of the colleagues I've talked with recently) and am thus in the process of obtaining a new degree (pol.sci with an intention of specializing in the interplay of politics and AI), for the last past months I've been swamped with work, and with quite traditional review work of reviewing human translation, at that. Of course that human translation might have been machine translation post-edit work but it doesn't feel like it is.

The role of a translator is like the role of a consultant, it’s insurance. This gives it more job security than it would have divorced from the legal system. A translation firm guarantees its translation, the same way that if you fuck up and can blame McKinsey, you might keep your job.

Your clients pay you because if the machine fails, they have nobody to sue.

Obviously one of the reasons, but if the role of the translator was to be a pure lawsuit tarbaby, they could just do things with AI and run it past me for my stamping for a fraction of the current cost. As it stands, some part of my work is MTPE (and even this is more involved and thus costlier for them than just giving it my imprimatur), but a large portion nevertheless still isn't.

If we end up with a qualified labour shortage because everyone went AI-Doomer, I will be laughing for some time.

They still have Translation Studies at our university, at least, with new translators getting degrees and starting their studies. It might be interesting to talk to some of them to see how they feel about the profession though at the same time I guess that they have already had to respond to "Why are you studying this when AI?" style questions dozens (hundreds) of times already.

Incredible.

I was very sure translation was fucking dead four years back when DeepL started doing English<->Czech passably well, not the mangled mess google translate was making.

Technical text sure. But literature translation is more closer to writing the book anew. I really appreciate the exemplary work the early 90s translatiors did with Wodehouse in my native language. You could feel in your bones the interwar period.

And when I read it in original - to my surprise some of the puns were less funnier in the original.

Is there that much demand for purely literary translation? I'd expect that like most romantic/artisanal fields, the bulk of the work is dry and boring. Here, make that washing machine's manual Spanish.

Currently, the bulk of my work is website content.

Literary translation has some demand and I know people who do it, the main problem is that the pay is crap compared to technical translation and much of it is dependent on getting grants.

Somehow that's even more surprising. Who even reads websites at this point? Most of the content I run into is commercial slop, and if it's not written by AI itself, it might as well have been.

Website content includes interface stuff, I should clarify.

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