These days, so many people are asking “Where is this whole machine translation/artificial intelligence (MT/AI) thing headed? Are we all going to be out of a job in a couple of years?” So I decided that for this month’s master class on direct client marketing, I would just prepare a few slides on this whole topic. People seemed to find it helpful, so I thought I would share a summary with you in this week’s post.
On the one hand…
- Our imminent demise has been predicted for over 30 years. I graduated from undergrad in 1993, and one of my professors told me, “I wouldn’t encourage you to go into translation, because I think that computers are going to completely take that over pretty soon.” And, 30 years later, we’re all still here!
- I’m 52 years old. As long as my body and mind hold up, I plan on working full-time until I’m 70ish, and I’m not looking for another career. Likewise, if my 21 year-old university student daughter wanted to become a translator or interpreter, I would perhaps give her some caveats (the language industry is a lot different from when I started 20+ years ago), but I would feel very positive about that decision, and I would encourage her to pursue a career in translation or interpreting.
- DeepL and similar tools have gotten a lot better, particularly for information-only translations (“What does this say in German??”), and I still feel that any good translator can tell you in about three sentences that a translation was done by a computer. To me, MT has no style, no flair, no creativity, and that is a lot of what my clients pay me to do.
- I also think that interpreting is, in general, more future-proof than translation. I do think that automated captioning of recorded materials is getting a lot better, and that in very controlled settings, we could see automated foreign-language captioning making some inroads. But I think that when it comes to “the magic earpiece” that turns a live speech or presentation into another language in seconds, those of us working in the industry today don’t have a lot to fear.
On the other hand…
- When people say that this iteration of MT/AI feels different, I agree. This iteration is not so much “eating the market from the bottom up,” as it is making inroads into the part of the market that most translators want to work in: mid-market agencies. It seems to me that most mid-market agencies are moving toward (or already using) a model where almost any file that is computer-readable is going to be translated using MT and then edited by a human.
- I think that there are lots of freelance translators who have cruised along for years, if not decades, working for a few mid-market agencies paying maybe 11-15 cents per word, with the translator doing little to no marketing and essentially having a steady job where they set the hours. I think that many of these agencies are now offering mostly editing work, at hourly rates that are a lot lower than what their translators were making per-word for translation. Lots of these mid-career translators have never worked with a direct client and, honestly, have no desire to do so, because they just want to translate.
And where do I think this is headed?
- Most importantly, I may be totally wrong. People much smarter than I am get technology predictions wrong all the time. I mentioned in the master class that I recently saw a reference to an article from 2012 (!!), in which Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that he thought self-driving cars would be so ubiquitous by 2017 that human drivers would be in the minority. Annnnnd, that’s not true by a long shot, even 11 years later. But, with that caveat, here’s what I think we may be looking at.
- I think that translation may follow a similar trajectory to what happened to web designers between about 2000 and 2015. I had a website in 2002. At that time, the only way to get a website was to hire a web designer who hand-coded the HTML for you in a fairly artisanal manner. Then came the earliest versions of WordPress (2003) and Squarespace (2004), and pretty soon, most people who wanted a basic website didn’t hire a designer at all; they used a website creation tool.
- However, it’s not like web designers disappeared as a species. And in fact, I would hazard a guess that the work done by most web designers in 2023 is both more interesting and more lucrative that the work they were doing in 2002. I honestly think that if the cream rises to the top of our industry, so to speak, it’s the most interesting and lucrative work that will continue to be sent to human translators.
- I also think that in the future, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to earn a healthy income (let’s say 90-110K or higher) without working for direct clients, and most importantly, without having good business skills. I think the world of “like a regular job where you set the hours,” where you’re going five years without doing any marketing, is going, if not gone, and we’ll probably see a fair number of translators drop out of the market or change careers because of that factor alone.
I hope you find these unscientific predictions (!!) helpful. If there’s anything you want to tell me, just put your reply in the comments!
Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. She holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College, is an ATA-certified French to English translator, and is Colorado court-certified for French interpreting. If you enjoy her posts, consider joining the Training for Translators mailing list!
Fully agree that MT is way better than it was a few years ago. But while it is indeed still inferior to *most* human translators *most of the time* it’s difficult to say whether that will continue to be the case.
And what’s even more uncertain is whether a significant number of clients will be willing to pay for whatever quality gain we humans provide. Not only the cost but also the convenience of (say) DeepL is causing end-users to use that, often without any editing, even for texts that are being published. We’d all say that’s dangerous, especially for translations into a language the end-user doesn’t understand, but there’s a lot of ignorance out there.
Regarding direct clients … it’s already the case that if one wants to work normal hours (40 hours a week, with a few weeks holiday a year) and earn a good graduate-level salary, then agencies are out. They simply cannot afford to pay translators a good rate if they cannot themselves command a higher rate from their clients. If they only want to pay for post-editing, at very low per-word or per-hour rates, then they’ll become even less attractive.
Thanks so much for your comment, and I agree with all of your points!!
Hello. Yes, translators are impacted by AI but the full post-editing is the next phase of workflow and extends into multilingual marketing.
Your post nails it, and in my language pair, Japanese-to-English, the exodus from translation is already happening.
Most translators have never marketed their services, and significant numbers refuse to even think that it is necessary. âRegistrationâ with an agency and putting up profile on reverse-auction platforms is their inherited paradigm, but that wonât work any longer. Direct clients are the solution, for some time, anyway.
The JA-to-EN translators here in Japan will be particularly hard hit if they try to get direct clients, because direct Japanese clients almost always expect face-to-face interaction to be convinced of capabilities, and not that many native English speaking translators here (perhaps fewer than 10%) can manage that in Japanese at a level Japanese clients expect a JA-to-EN translator to be capable of. Our ranks are already shrinking, and the shrinking will accelerate.
Bill Lise in Japan
Really interesting observation about the Japanese market, thanks!!
I agree with you that to stay profitable, it’s necessary to move into working with direct clients, which is a different skill level and requires sending proposals/sales calls/education/setting your workflow etc.
My direct clients don’t care how I get to the result. Thus, I’m also testing AI to see how it can help me speed up my work. I find ChatGPT a great tool to give me alternative suggestions for headlines or ask it to rephrase a paragraph when I’m not happy with my translation.
We need to learn how to make these new tools work for us and find clients directly without relying on agencies.
Additionally, I added new skills and services to my portfolio, like SEO, which helps immensely attract companies needing help with their German websites. I think the future is bright but requires more flexibility and resilience than in the past.
Really interesting, thank you!!
2023 was the first year I had fewer translation jobs than ever (easy to blame AI). But I think translators who deliver great work in the IT, law, or medical field, will always get by. A company simply can’t trust AI with important texts (yet).
Thank you!
This aligns with my experience.
A while back, an author approached me with a view to my translating his highly technical textbook on ballistics, having had me translate a previous book for him, pre-AI. This time, he asked whether it would be quicker if I used DeepL and then post-edited.
I ran the first few pages through DeepL and post-edited them. The process took about as long as I would have needed to translate those pages myself, and the result was still not as it should be. I reported back on this, and he said that in the meantime he’d asked a mutual acquaintance (subject specialist, not a linguist, but speaks a number of languages) who had run a similar test and come to the same conclusion.
So for this (huge) project at least, it was the customer and a subject specialist who took DeepL off the table as much as it was me. What perhaps made a difference was that the other specialist had been used to working with professional translators for decades, and appreciates their work.
Really interesting, thanks Steve! I don’t use DeepL for translations (I use it for interpreting prep), and I had always wondered about/suspected this. What we’re really interested in is time savings, and is it really faster, for a complex translation, to start with a DeepL draft?? Thanks for this!
I totally agree with you! I hadn’t thought about the web designers example before, but it fits perfectly. I have been working as a translator for 5 years now, so I consider myself a beginner basically, but I don’t think MT and AI is such an enormous threat to us as many people say. Sure, it will take a part of our jobs, but just the most basic part, the only one that can be handled my a machine alone. Good translation is a complex matter that requires a resourceful and creative mind, and creativity cannot be taught to a machine.
Glad you enjoyed the post, thanks!!
I am a Swedish/English translator and subtitler. I used to get dozens of job offers every day before the pandemic. When it hit, streaming services and other clients decided to outsource even more services to people with little to no experience. Thus, the quality of the jobs and the rates dropped significantly. In less than a year, the regular rates were cut by 50-75%.
Agencies started relying on MT. The translation jobs slowly disappeared and in their place we received job offers involving âeditingâ MT. It meant tight deadlines, an insignificant rate per word and the jobs usually involved twice as much work. First, you would have to check everything, only to realise most of it had to go. Then you had to delete everything and start translating from scratch.
In 2023, the job offers stopped coming altogether. Projects were dropped one by one. Every now and again, a fake agency would reach out with job offers. Theyâd seem legit, but then they would give you texts to translate as a test. After they received the translations, the agency would disappear. This happened to me a handful of times. A different agency each time, though they were all based in China.
Several translation agencies that I was working for, stopped communicating last year. Months later theyâd rebranded themselves as AI agencies. They dropped their translator pools without so much as a word.
I have had two small gigs since last summer, and one of them was related to AI. I have not been able to take out a pay in almost a year and a half.
I am not sure if there is a future in translating right now. Profit seems to trump quality these days. People seem to accept poor subtitles and translations in general. Itâs very sad.
For now, I am focusing on writing books and figuring out alternative ways to use my linguistic skills.