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0 pointslayer85mo ago0 comments

I know translators that have. Not because there’s nothing left to do for humans in quality translation, but because demand and compensation dropped so much that you can’t make a living from it anymore.

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1970-01-015mo ago

This is a great point. I would make the counterargument that app translators doing simple transactions of languageA to languageB for $X was possible a decade ago. AI certainly has made that low hanging fruit impossible to capitalize at speed and scale. Since AI has made the easiest part of translator's jobs much harder to monetize, translators can still offer value in lengthy transactions. Books that are to be translated for publishing, legal documents, and languages that are not understood by AI.

layer8OP5mo ago

The (former) translators I know mostly translated B2B publications (brochures, specifications, …), commonly containing specialized domain vocabulary. Certainly not low-hanging fruit. I’m sure AI can’t make a quality job on those without guidance and review by a speaker of both languages knowledgeable in the respective domain. Nevertheless, the market for such translations has dried up, and those that remain only pay a pittance.

Part of the reason likely is that the perception that translation is valuable work has changed.

brainwad5mo ago

It's because the marginal value of idiomatic human translations, over robotic and partially bad machine translations, is not actually that high. Especially not for B2B where people can accept poor prose from a trading partner.

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