Here’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while…and since my main work computer picked last night as a good time to die (don’t worry…everything was backed up), I have some time on my hands while it’s being repaired. This post is in response to various questions I’ve gotten from readers, colleagues, and students over the past few months, along the lines of:
“I came across a company based here in Paris who asks translators to sign up to a platform in order to submit their work for free (or for a coffee mug if you’re very good), and I wondered if you had any thoughts on the changing landscape of the freelance market for translators.”
“Are you worried about MT encroaching into certain translation markets, or into the translation industry as a whole?”
“Do you think translators should be looking for other jobs?”
I think these questions speak to a general uncertainty about, as the first questioner put it, the changing landscape of the freelance translation market. So let’s dive in; I’ll give my thoughts and you can give yours in the comments.
Short answer: Yes, things are changing in our industry. More people are doing freelance work in general, and more people are entering our industry through non-traditional pathways that may make them more amenable to lower rates. It’s getting harder and harder to make a living at the low end of our industry and there’s more competition at the high end, as more people opt out of the low end. Machine translation is certainly going to make some inroads into the “information-only” translation market, and into specializations where controlled vocabulary is an option. At the same time, I don’t think that our entire industry is going the way of the stagecoach driver. In fact, I think these changes might separate out the clients who want, need, and are willing to pay for really good translations. And for certain languages and specializations, MT simply is not a viable competitor to human translators for any type of project, and perhaps never will be.
I think the main choice we need to make is: If you’re going to work in the translation industry into the foreseeable future, do you want to be a translation software specialist, or a writer?
Longer answer: All of these are factors I think about in my own business. When I started in the industry (insert cranky old-timer voice) fifteen years ago, things were different. Even the mega-agencies generally paid non-peanuts rates, and most freelancers simply would not work for minimum wage. But lots of things have changed since then. I recently read a Freelancers Union survey stating that about 34% of Americans are independent workers, and that number is expected to increase by about 50% by 2020. That reality causes some shifts. As an example, I’ve recently talked to various beginning translators who’ve told me something along the lines of, “I currently work as a barista/nanny/museum guard/bilingual administrative assistant, making $9.25 an hour plus tips with no benefits or paid time off. So if I could make $20 an hour and work from home on my own schedule, I’d be thrilled.” I’m not blaming them or saying that that outlook is negative, but it exists, and it has an effect on the market as a whole.
Now, what about MT? I’m not an MT hater, at all. As I often explain to my clients, I use Google Translate myself…just not for anything other than a general gist of meaning. If I’m going on vacation to Italy and want to know what days a museum is open and closed, Google Translate does the job. When a client in Switzerland forgets that I don’t speak German and e-mails me about a translation auf Deutsch, Google Translate can usually provide a pretty good approximation of what they’re asking. If I translated for industries where translations are mostly done for informational purposes only, mostly include only a limited range of vocabulary, and where there’s some tolerance for bad writing or even minor mistranslations (think of the little user pamphlets that come with things like earbuds and can openers…), I’d be doing some strategizing. I’d ask myself: if the trends in MT, including neural networking, continue, am I going to be happy translating and post-editing 6,000 or 10,000 words a day for a couple of cents a word? Or would I rather look elsewhere?
In my own work, I’ve made a deliberate decision to work with a different kind of client. As an example, I recently started translating blog posts for a European environmental foundation. When I did the sample translation for them, they said, “Don’t treat it as a legal translation; rewrite it the way an American blog post should sound.” That’s the kind of client I’m looking for, because that’s a skill that MT doesn’t have.
If you want a comparison with another industry, I’d think in terms of the effect of tax preparation software on independent accountants and small accounting firms. Just like MT can give me a reasonable approximation of the menu at my favorite pizzeria in Milan, TurboTax and its ilk can do a decent job of preparing a simple tax return. I would assume that tax preparation software has taken a chunk out of the lower end of the accounting market, i.e. people who would otherwise use a chain, storefront accounting service. But, as someone who spends about $1,000 a year on accounting for my freelance business, I would never, in a million years, dump my accountant for TurboTax. I think of my accountant as the CFO of my business; she can advise me on whether to shunt more money into my retirement account or spend it on upgrading my computer system, or whether I’m missing any hidden deductions, or what I should do when I unexpectedly make more or less money in a quarter than I thought I would. As an example, here’s a story by a writer who pitted TurboTax against her human accountant and stuck with the human. Just as MT cannot tell a client whether US readers would know where Fribourg is (no, say “Fribourg, Switzerland”), or whether “their” is preferable to “his/her” (less clunky but may be too casual for formal writing; see Chicago Manual of Style for workarounds), TurboTax isn’t going to be your CFO.
In sum, I don’t think it’s a question of whether the translation industry will still be here in 20 years; I feel confident that it will. I think the larger and more important question is where you want to fit in: translating and/or post-editing huge volumes of words a day, or working as more of a bilingual writer. Readers, over to you: thoughts on this?
I agree — with reservations, as always.
Ninety-nine out of 100 (if not more) freelancers earning as much as Corinne (or less) can (and do) do with TurboTax, if not with a calculator. Simply ecause a human accountant (like Corinne’s “CFO”) will be an extravagant luxury.
MT’s “inroads into the “information-only” translation market” is a gross understatement: in light of the worldwide tendency for cost cutting, it has long become a massive aggression.
The slots for handwork — “working as more of a bilingual writer” — will definitely remain in areas which are about convincing and, moreover, persuading people (often, to part with their money or vote in a certain way). But such slots will be very narrow, given globalisation, the competition will be fierce, and you will have to be really damned good at the job and knowing your subject to fit in.
(Sure, if you are “a barista/nanny/museum guard/bilingual administrative assistant” toying with the idea of making “$20 an hour and working from home”, forget it. You won’t make it. )
Corinne, as you may know, I wrote a blog post on the “creative destruction” in the translation market at the end of last month — the collapse of bulk-market rates combined with the astonishing performance of GT because of its ability to leverage billions of strings of human-translated text in its corpora — and since then, several people have written extended commentaries that examine these two ideas and also use an analogy (mine was photography; yours is tax advisory services; there are others that are popular).
Just a few thoughts, since I think everybody has covered the basics well.
A recent market survey of translation agencies put the agency-charged rates in the bulk market at 30 – 35% below “anticipated rates” over the last 4 years, so that is a powerful and continuing trend of downward pressure on rates, as agencies themselves are in a race to the bottom (the bulk market is the “good enough to understand,” market which has been estimated to account for roughly 60% of all translation, and even — surprisingly — includes basic legal and financial translation, for example, and large-scale litigation which used to be valued in the millions for translators);
GT has become astonishingly good at texts in these markets that are “standardized.” I don’t mean “word substitution” or “word-for-word,” I mean texts such as judicial rulings where the corpora contain billions of words of existing professionally translated court rulings, findings, discovery, testimony, etc. , and in certain financial markets, where a lot of translators make their livings translating formalized financial statements. A few translators have been experimenting with how ATA certified translators stack up against GT on profit-and-loss statements, for example, and the GT is coming out ahead because it doesn’t fall for any of the traps awaiting those who may not have the formal training to deal with the depth of accounting terminology and concepts that GT does because it is leveraging the translations of humans with that expertise that produced the translations in the first place (working at the U.N., the E.U., the European Patent Office, the Government of Canada, and a huge number of other banks, non-profits and other international organizations).
It’s important to note that the irony of this development is that GT is doing what many of us have been advising (begging) translators to do since the dawn of time, and that is to collaborate with their skilled colleagues on every job — something that’s become difficult to do with the falling rates (see above) — but this is something that GT is very, very good at doing. There is a sad irony in the way GT is leveraging some excellent human translations and serving them up for re-use on a silver platter for free.
This first became evident over 10 years ago when GT was included in the various “mystery shopper experiments” that Chris Durban conducted and now several European translators are doing. Translators who are invited to comment on the translation quality today, though, are increasingly identifying GT as human translation (because in many cases, that’s exactly what it is).
One former high-level official in ATA who is an extraordinarily talented translator (that’s about as far as I’ll go in identifying the individual to preserve privacy) is convinced “the gig is up.” That’s a quote. I’m hearing the same commentary from some European translators in a related field, one of whom would really surprise you. The reason? The business that the ATA person has run for many years is competing against a free service that performs on a level that just a few years ago it couldn’t, and humans owned. But now the emails to that business have crawled to a tiny flow in this case, because “good enough to understand” has become accessible to clients, who wonder why they need agencies and why human translators even still exist at all (keeping in mind that these business are operating in the “good enough to understand” bulk market).
I’m a lot more optimistic than my colleagues above and agree with you that the future for humans in any skills-based business — whether it be photography or tax preparation — is to do what the smartphone or TurboTax cannot: Work upmarket for clients who not only need quality, but whose own business survival depends on compelling, authoritative and convincing texts. For translators, those are the “value-added” market and the “premium” market.
Where I think we need to be more careful in our guidance for translators working right now is to be as transparent as possible about the fact that while you and I are optimists, we are not the only thinkers (or businesses) in the game. To hear what I have in recent months from very respected translators who are hurting terribly has been more than a bit heart-wrenching.
The solution still lies in collaboration — find especially skilled colleagues to work with — and become friendly with those who work in the other direction, as they are excellent sources of referral work.
Specialize in areas that cannot possibly operate without this expertise and laser-focus on your subject-matter expertise. There are dozens of such fields, from high-risk science and engineering (including published journals) as well as banking, high-end marketing, multinationals’ formal financial statements (that require a lot of creativity outside the columns of figures) and even mid-sized or even niche markets collectively worth billions that will never stand for poor quality translation, and whose texts defy standardization, or that require adaptation, as you describe in your website example.
But ideally you will need to have expertise on a level that allows you to engage these clients as equals (this is especially true of science and technology, but it extends out into multiple other fields). So if you’re a financial translator specialized in IPOs, then you need to have the same level of expertise in IPOs that brokers and companies that need your services do.
Finally, the ability to write original, compelling texts, as taught in the “Translate in the..” series in FrEng by such people such as Grant Hamilton, David Jemielity, Dominique Jonkers, Chris Durban and others, will be the way of the future. This series has already changed careers, and I’m hopeful that the budding DeEng one under ATA and the potential expansion into Spanish in coming years will provide the lift translators need to stay many miles ahead of the “great leveraging machine” that GT has become.
The good news — great news, actually — is that the value-added and premium markets can’t find enough expert translators who collaborate and write exceedingly well, so if you live in Europe and work into English, for example, there is huge upward flexibility on rates, and the same is true of expert translators with these same skills in many countries around the world. Of course, almost all of this work is with direct clients, but there are some boutique agencies still out there holding their heads high.
I apologize for the long post, but there is a lot to say on this subject, and I think we owe it to our colleagues to be as honest as possible, and as direct as needed, to emphasize the market dynamics at play.
I appreciate your allowing me the real-estate to make some of these points, because I think the time for translators to adapt is right this very second.
Hi Corinne, great post, thank you! All best, Michael
These are extremely interesting and cogent points that you and Kevin raise, Corinne. I have couple of ideas I’d like to add on the subject:
First of all, as Kevin points out, writing well is important. I’d go further than that and say that a translator’s success is probably based most on his or her writing ability in the target language. This will become more and more true if, as you say, the market will be there mainly for upscale translation.
Working against this – and this is particularly true of translators whose target language is English – is a tendency for expectations regarding quality to become lower, and for MT quality to become acceptable for virtually everything except publicity and literary translation. This is a societal phenomenon, more common, I suspect, in the English speaking world, and unfortunately probably most common in the USA, and there’s not much we as translators can do about it. For whatever reason (and there are several), English speakers are just more tolerant of bad grammar than speakers of other languages.
As for MT, Kevin is spot on when he mentions that the quality is improving. I have noticed it with GT, and especially German to English. German is a good “test case” – due to its word order and sentence construction, literary German is often more difficult to translate into English than a lot of other languages; I’ve seen GT turn out better translations from Vietnamese into English than from German. When I first looked at GT translations from German a few years ago, they were frequently so bad that they were almost totally incomprehensible; in just a few years, their quality has miraculously improved. I can only presume that this is true across the board with other languages.
As Corinne says, you have to decide where you want to be in the industry; as for myself, I don’t expect to do this for more than another ten years or so (I’m over 60 now), and I had the unexpected blessing of a past career in insurance and finance, which gave me a ready-made specialty for translation that is – at least so far – in reasonably high demand. Not everybody may agree with me, but I definitely feel that it helps to have some life experience in one or more sectors of the economy before getting into this line of work, to say nothing of improving your credibility when looking for clients, too.
Interesting read and cautionary tale(s) here, I see.
But while we’re busy raising the alarm (“changing market(s)/industry ahead!”) I’m once again struck by how partial many big-picture assessments and claims are.
For example, and with all due respect to Palomnik, I’m getting tired of hearing that MT will soon be good enough for everything except marketing and literature. (MT vendors make claims like that all the time, although they usually add “poetry” to the need-human-translator-here mix. : -))
Could we broaden that, please? Like, er, a lot?
I translate from French to English, a language combination where MT is supposed to be better than in other language combinations, thanks to the EU corpus and bilingual Canadian content. I translate texts for business and finance — some marketing, but above all a steady stream of speeches, minutes, press releases, HR guidance, corporate strategy, corporate governance, internal reports and listing materials. IOW, not a book or poem in sight. Often my clients use less expensive options for run-of-the-mill documents, and that’s fine — makes good sense, in fact. But the remaining documents – of which there are plenty – are strategic enough that they cannot take that risk. They need professional wetware, someone who tracks their field, will ask questions, raise issues, produce texts that work in a timely way.
Demand is strong and prices are on the rise. Good news, right? Yet time and again, I see work produced by translators — experienced or newbies — keen to cash in on the attractive prices, but not focused enough to deliver the goods. Because they haven’t done the work. And frankly, below a certain price there is no way on earth they will be able to do the work.
In the olden days, suppliers like these might have been put off by the sheer effort of looking up each word in a dictionary; nowadays they can run their source text through some handy software and fiddle with the output. At the recent ITI conference, Tony Parr and Marcel Lemmens gave some sobering examples.
The original blogpost and other comments here mention writing skills and specialization. Absolutely, and that needs to be said. But I also see cases where wannabe translators don’t master the foreign language(s) they claim to work from. Instead they’re coasting on knowledge picked up on a super-fun junior year abroad, or a college course or two, or vacations or family connections of some sort. I.e., a level of language skills that will bag you a job as a barista or a nanny, but… professional translation? Not so much.
This to point out that all of the premium (yup, that word) translators I know spend a lot of time working on their language skills, regardless of their years at the wordface. They don’t coast; they work constantly to improve and maintain their languages and their craft, failing which they lose their edge — and their clients.
So if we agree that a shake-out is looming, yes, it behooves experienced professionals to remind beginners and newbies just how demanding the serious end of the market is. It is naturally less important for part-timers and life-style translators.
A question for Corinne and others pitching courses to newbies: extending a warm welcome is great, but do you ever recommend that newcomers work on their language skills proper for a few years (yes, a few years) before jumping into the market? Or, in light of what you can see of their sensitivity to language, suggest that translation is probably not for them?
While Corinne et al. warn that the glass is already half empty, Chris cheerfully notes that the glass is already half full. 🙂
Demand for professional wetware doesn’t grow fast enough to overtake the fast growth in the supply of cheap amateur “wetware” from mountebanks and smart alecs “coasting on knowledge picked up on a super-fun junior year abroad, or a college course or two, or vacations or family connections of some sort” and cheating using Google Translate, creating customers’ impression that all “translation industry” is now bad and cheap.
Or, conversely, the supply of cheap amateur “wetware” from mountebanks and smart alecs “coasting on knowledge picked up on a super-fun junior year abroad, or a college course or two, or vacations or family connections of some sort” and cheating using Google Translate is too great and overtakes the growth in demand for professional wetware.
Feel the difference? 🙂
Thanks for the very timely and thoughtful post, Corinne.
I have been pondering the same questions, and, coming from a technical and computer background, I decided I needed to know more about machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and neural networks. So I took several excellent online courses on the subject, including one at the Master’s level which involved quite a bit of programming. Although I’m far from an expert now and have not taken a course on NLP (natural language processing), which is computer science speak for MT, I have gained some deeper insights. I believe that certain professions and certain segments of other professions, including translation, will go the way of the Dodo and MySpace very soon. However, I also believe that the “premium” segment, as defined above, will be one of the last bastions of human versus machine. Why? Because the number of possibilities or “moves,” if you will, in terms of input (source text) and output (translated text) is essentially infinite and never constant.
At this point in time, computers can beat humans in games like go and chess, because the number of possible moves is very large, but finite. In chess, there are only 64 squares with 16 pieces and very specific allowed moves. While computers don’t play through every possible move, for any given state in the game, there are only a finite amount of moves to consider that make sense in the immediate and even longer-term future. Also, the final state/goal is quite restricted – you either win or lose or it’s a draw. The same is true in other successful applications of AI. In language, however, the opposite holds. Although some phrases and words are more likely to follow any given phrase, the possibilities are endless, because you can always concatenate or modify existing words, or even invent new ones. See, e.g. James Joyce or a patent on a truly novel invention. Even the possibilities for the content of the text are infinite. Sure, a financial report or a technical user manual will likely always contain a variation of the same, but the content of a literary text cannot be predicted. Of course, there are the boilerplate crime stories which are always a variation of the same theme, but then there are the plot twists of the Agatha Christies of the world. Language is infinite and always evolving.
That does not mean, however, that the “premium” segment can ignore computers and AI. To pick up on the example of the accountant above, true, not even AI can function as a CFO, but a computer can run through possible financial scenarios, tax deductions etc. much much faster than even a highly knowledgeable expert human can. Thus, any accountant who ignores computerized tools including AI tools would be a fool. The same goes for translation.
So, IMHO AI will replace human translators for texts where translations of similar texts already exist. In the case of the “non-premium” market, where “good enough” is good enough, this will happen sooner rather than later. In the case of the premium market, this will happen later or after the occurrence of the so-called “singularity,” which is what computer scientists call the event when computers learn to actually “think.” But when or if that happens, all human professions will be obsolete.
I basically agree with everything in the original post and comments. I am well aware that it behooves me to be at the top of my game and become increasingly better and more strategic. That being said, I see GT as a great thing for an additional reason: because I predict that more and more mediocre translators will be kicked out of the market. It’s too bad for them, but I cheer. They had a good run, but they never should have been translating in the first place and it’s time for them to start making an honest living.
I especially look forward to non-native translators (in language combinations with no shortage of native-target translators; of course, I bear non-native Latvian-English or Korean-Turkish translators no ill will) being shook out. If a non-native speaks the target language flawlessly, great. I don’t have a problem with it. So often, though, their second language skills are atrocious, they get to be bilingual just because they decided to go around and start saying they are (while the rest of us look upon their every garbled utterance with horror), and they milk clients for all they’re worth by delivering embarrassing, nonsensical, rudimentary texts whose quality the client is completely unfit to judge. I wouldn’t think twice before telling clients that if the decision is between GT for free and paying a mediocre, non-native translator for linguistic slop, GT is absolutely the way to go. Certainly for price, and now quality as well.
I should state that while I’m not sorry to see bad translators get their comeuppance, the sentiment isn’t personal. I don’t bemoan their driving down rates in the bulk market; I just want clients to understand what they’re really paying for and for them to have fewer bad suppliers to choose from. If they can get a perfectly good-enough translation for free from GT for their purposes, let none of us pretend it’s not good business sense to do so. Either pay high for top quality, or get something that’s just OK for free. Don’t pay for just OK–even low pay (“peanuts”) is too expensive a price to pay when you wake up to how bad it’s been all along. Those clients were taken for a ride, and bad translators basically never get called out on it.
Wow! This blog started out as a consideration of MT and its long-term effect, and it has turned into a rant against so-called “bottom feeder” translators.
I think that it’s worth remembering 1) everybody has to start somewhere, 2) translators are like artists in that academic credentials are NOT what make them good at what they do, but rather talent and attitude, and 3) the most successful translators financially are largely the ones that are best at marketing themselves.
I’m reminded of Mircea Eliade’s comment in the introduction to his book “Two Tales of the Occult” that the sole reason the work appeared in English was because Professor W.A. Coates was so impressed by the book (he read a German version) that he taught himself Romanian just so that he could translate the book into English. I get the feeling that a lot of people in the industry would view that as “unprofessional”, or at best a misguided effort by an eccentric academic.
I submit that there are probably not many people in the barista category that remain working in translation, for the simple reason that a lot of people do not enjoy translation work – even people who are eminently qualified to do it. Many consider it to be drudge work, and others don’t enjoy work where there is little direct human interaction.
In short, the most important qualification is that you gotta love it.
palomnik, apart from MT being (in most cases) free, it attracts too many barista wannabes, relying on MT, into the industry, True, few, if any at all, remain in the trade, but as they leave, they leave behind low rates they have pushed down. You see the connection, don’t you? 🙂
From my personal experience, it is not barista wannabes or the like that are pushing rates down; they are an ephemeral issue. For me, the major factor pushing rates down is translators translating from their native language into the target – usually (although maybe not always) English. We all know that this is a very dodgy practice, but a lot of agencies do this – because these translators will work cheap, and because the agency can hire a native speaker to edit and “clean up” the translation. These are not barista wannabes; they often even have a degree in English, but that doesn’t mean that they can translate into English successfully.
Translators who work in French or German may not notice this trend, because these languages pay a high premium for work since translators working in these languages almost all live in relatively prosperous countries. I started out as a Russian>English translator and I have seen a serious deterioration in translated material, mainly because Russian clients prefer to hire native Russians because they will work cheaper – as little as two cents a word or less in some cases, I suspect. Since I’ve insisted on maintaining my rates, I am rarely offered any work in Russian any more, and what I do see usually comes from Kazakhstan.
I have also started refusing Russian editing jobs because more often than not the work was done by a native Russian, and I will spend almost as much time editing it as I would have if I did the original translation myself.
I don’t really mean to single out Russian translators, because I suspect that something similar is going on in other language combinations, possibly Spanish>English. Has anybody else noticed similar trends?
I realize that this is getting off topic, and maybe Corinne might care to broach this subject in a separate area.
I see your point, thank you. But I also see that dirt-cheap translating into non-native target language is only a facet of the broader low-rate problem: translation into non-native target language is dirt-cheap not because it’s into non-native target lang per se (and is in 90% of cases poor) but because it’s dirt-cheap in terms of low rates the non-native wannabes have to accept. Which drives them in turn to MT to compensate with “productivity” and poorer still quality. Which makes agencies to hire editors at wannabees’ expense. This is regenerative amplification, positive feedback or whatever they call it in technology, which works in society as surely as the law of gravitation elsewhere.
Btw, the Russian market has not only dramatically contracted under the Western sactions and Putin’s counter-sanctions over the past three years; it has been also hit by the weak ruble; small wonder Russians can’t affor importing at more than two cents a word.
Exactly right, Palomnik, about agencies cutting their costs by getting very bad human- or machine-translated work and paying little for a native English speaker to fix it up.
The last job I got of this sort (I do Japanese>English) was either done by a Japanese or possibly Chinese native speaker with poor English writing ability, judging from the mistakes I had to fix, or even by a machine. There were several mistakes in every sentence, from beginning to end, and after this experience I vowed to never take an “editing” or “proofreading” job again, unless I could see the job first and determine how much work I would have to put in.
I’m sure that this is getting to be a very popular cost-cutting tactic. The translation woods are getting very dangerous out there. I got my start so long ago that I don’t have the slightest idea how I would advise a beginner today; conditions are vastly different from then.
I think it’s important to say a word about my background before I comment. I am an American & a sworn translator (in Europe) with over 10 years of professional experience in legal translation, and currently I run a team of translators in Europe.
Translators ought to embrace MT as a tool. I am even petitioning to implement it at my company. The reason is not that my team ought to post-edit 10,000 words a day. The reason is that it can aid my team & open up new possibilities in how the team works. Some, not all, MT that I have seen is remarkably good; it does not produce quality work product, but neither do some translators — just one example, recently I had two translators each with over 25 years of experience who did not understand the difference between ‘as of June 1, 2017’ and ‘on June 1, 2017.’ The idea is that, with certain (not all) projects, I can choose the kind of control a project requires or I think it requires based on past experience. MT can be of some help in getting a draft & speeding up that initial process. And that can mean a lot in some instances. In other words, MT should be embraced as a tool in full recognition of its limitations, but also in full recognition of its benefits & usefulness.
Dear Corinne, I just read your article and your article raised my thoughts, because I am particularly surprised at the questiongs in the article. I am quite agree with your opinions that “MT simply is not a viable competitor to human translators for any type of project, and perhaps never will be”. In my view, translators are more than just people who transfer content from one language into another. I do believe translators cannot be replaced by machines.
For translators, they don’t hate technology. They hate inefficient technology like the Smartling translation environment, whose miserable ergonomics slow down their work and generally reduce their income. MT encroaching into certain translation markets, or into the translation industry as a whole is completely not true as there will never exist a robot that will be able to translate as good as a human does.
As a translation major student, I like use translation technology that can help me complete work efficiently. As we know, tools like CAT MemoQ can provide translators with great convenience, and that’s why we get training in college to use them. Also, as professionals, we should be ready to invest money in the development of those tools.
Having been studying translation for several months, sometimes, I find it is hard to use proper expression in translation localization. I’m aiming to get some translation skills, and plan to look for ways to develop ability of expression. I think it’s a good idea to take courses in my target language country as it’s likely to get more practical opportunities.