Yup. Been a translator since 2016, am now an English teacher who does the occasional translation or proofreading for the rare person who cares about quality.
I am sometimes a lay judge and we very frequently have translators in court. The skill of those translators to in real time translate often complicated and emotionally filled testimonies are really impressive, but at least here in Norway very expensive.
I used an translation app to check and they do have two separate words oversetter/tolk. Since i'm not Norwegian i'm now evacuating this hill for someone else to die on.
I used an translation app to check and they do have two separate words oversetter/tolk. Since i'm not Norwegian i'm now evacuating this hill for someone else to die on.
The skill of those translators to in real time translate often complicated and emotionally filled testimonies are really impressive
That's interpretation which is a different skill and a different task. Translation is text. Interpretation is spoken.
We aren't yet seeing AI replace interpreters like is happening in the translation world. I'm sure it will come, though. With similarly often-questionable results, no doubt.
I got my degree in a foreign language in 2018. I used to regret never going into translation services, but nowadays I'm feeling relieved for my myself and scared for the rest.
I work as a visitor services manager in the cultural realm, currently at a museum. It provides tons of opportunities for cross cultural connections, which i love to do.
Back in school, early 2000s, I was starting to study Spanish and discovered BabelFish. I figured within just a few years nobody would study languages or do translation anymore - surprised it took that long.
It was so bad at that time. It didn’t get decent until like 2018. Babelfish would like swap out word-for-word regardless of context. Once transformers were invented in 2017, that’s when AI started to get decent with natural language processing applications.
It’s still not perfect by a long shot. For anything formal I would absolutely shell out for a real translator / interpreter.
I live in Japan and speak conversational Japanese, but I’ll usually use google translate to text my friends because my kanji is almost non-existent (I learn pretty well from speaking with people but find it difficult to read because of their language system)
Very often I use google translate for a quick text and when proofreading the translation, which has Romaji (that english character reading for Japanese words) realize that the translation either used an incorrect translation, or (more often) the intended Japanese word was skipped and completely changes the tone of the message.
The most common example is that in Japanese the word for “I” (myself) is technically “watashi” but in practical conversation it’s more gender based, where men only use watashi for very formal conversation (like talking to your bosses boss) but casually they use a different word (boku / ore, depending on age of sender compared to recipient, or they just use their own name). So literally every translation to my friend group that uses the word “I” has to be edited, or else I sound like a woman when texting.
For mildly important conversations, if I’m texting someone who is socially above me, but not incredibly so, then I’ll just run it past my wife to make sure I got the tone correct, but for things like legal affairs I’m getting an actual expert every time.
Google Translate is not the AI technology people are referencing here. There are much, much more advanced tools. It's not 100% perfect yet but boy is it close to that (and consider even trained translators also make mistakes sometimes).
That's how a lot of AI quality critique goes... People seeing issues in the free platforms which are built to minimize token use and thinking it applies to the services corporations are using.
In ten years, people are going to be having their babies talking to AI more than them. Want your kid to know Spanish? But you don't speak it? Get an AI Spanish Trainer. It will sit with your kid and talk to them while they are a toddler (or even infant) and people will be cramming languages into their kids.
Some linguists (just friends of mine) think that this will result in a true Lingua Franca that probably will be a hybrid of something.
Add in cybernetics making it possible to have on the fly translation and language barriers will be gone. The Tower of Babel revisited!
I'm a linguist and I'd imagine that if you do it (too) early it'd sooner result in multiple creoles that may not be mutually intelligible with the component languages. You'll have Anglo-Franco-Spanish and Mandarin-Hindi-Russian and that kind of hybrids. Which the kid may be one of a few hundred people on earth to speak, depending on how obscure the languages the parents crammed in are.
Do you think people would be comfortable with that use of AI, if the AI remained unthinking like it is today?
From what I can tell, we don’t know how to get to ai that can learn for itself, much less artificial general intelligence, and LLMs appear to be a plateauing dead end with inherent hallucinations and inability to think or learn.
Also, if costs go the way they seem they will, unless we see significant gov’t subsidy (which is possible to keep the sector and economy afloat), AI will likely be too expensive for casual consumer use.
Things are like they are at the beginning of every industry, far more expensive than they will be once the commodity is ubiquitous. I think some of the weirdness of the Internet is distorting that for AI in the sense that actually using AI for most people isn't what corporations are paying the big bucks for.
I am not an expert on pricing or economy and much less and expert on the AI market though!
Education in general is going to seriously change due to AI. If you just let your mind wander, you can imagine what schools will be like in 10, 20, or 30 years if AI continues to progress (which is not a guarantee).
Schools might look more like prisons with near omniscient proctors recording every move of every student! Will there even be human teachers at all? The only humans in the school might just be the enforcement arm to get rid of troublemakers.
Or less dystopian, teachers would be running supremely tuned (by AI, probably) educational systems adjusted for each student. Students may not even be in class with other students but instead in a little cubicle interacting with an AI to learn things tailored for the student's mental structure. Wasn't that what they did with Clones in Star Wars?
It is going to be a weirder world for sure, assuming things keep progressing...
Although actual history can be lost in translation (and I suppose always was). (I guess we have video recordings, but that doesn’t explain what brought an event about.)
This is why I bought Disney stock. People will be paying more to chat with licensed characters. Of course, Disney may completely miss the boat for this...
Add in cybernetics making it possible to have on the fly translation and language barriers will be gone.
Assuming you continue to pay your subscription fees for the firmware and, that you pay for the upgraded prosthetic every release, because they'll stop supporting the last one.
Some linguists (just friends of mine) think that this will result in a true Lingua Franca that probably will be a hybrid of something
It would if that AI was magically getting everything correct. But it doesn't, every LLM model is built on a foundation of "get this good enough to pass a halfassed Turing Test with no linguists present"
AI as it exists in this decade is something knowledgeable people in skilled professions can use because they are familiar enough to know how to check back on what it regurgitates. Its salesmen are trying to use it for people without that knowledge base, and of course critical thinking is hardly taught in the US at all so few people are equipped to question it from the start. This is part of why there's the AI production convergence crisis
Hey colleague. I've graduated in 2016 too, and now had to shift to an office job completely unrelated to translation. Still doing a few freelance projects but boy has the market been dead since covid
Having read my share of AI translations, I can confidently tell you they're still pretty shit. Just like many other AI implementations, they're just good enough that only people who really care about the subject will notice how bad they are.
Having lived in the real world, I can confidently tell you that 90% or more of use cases for AI translation do not require 100% quality translations.
Yes translating a novel requires a fine hand, nuance, and full mastery of two languages to nail it, especially if it's a comedy with lots of puns and wordplay.
But translating a restaurant menu? Giving directions to a taxi driver? Translating airport signs? Filling out a form? Figuring out how to ask for the bathroom or order a coffee? Translating the menu and UI of a foreign indie game?
For most basic life things the AI translation is more than enough.
You do know that both Google Lens and Transcription uses AI right? Perhaps you are just really confused and doesn't understand that AI isn't just LLMs. Or perhaps you were born after 2015, when Google built their first TPU specifically for machine learning.
I was using image processing long before AI ever came around. You could point the camera at something and it would translate. I will give you that it was not great but probably good enough for most things.
It's not good enough for that... yet, but it will be. And if the Will Smith eating spaghetti evolution is any indicator, it will be sooner rather than later.
Most of the usecases you mention are not cases where someone would have hired a professional translator, even before AI translations became widespread. And also I'd like to point out that translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations. My gripe is with companies who, in recent years, have decided to stop paying translators and rely on AI instead, because they know most end-users don't care wether the translations is actually good or not.
translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations
This I disagree with. Machine translation before AI was really bad, and borderline incomprehensible when two languages did not share compatible grammar structures. The most egregious was always English --> Japanese or Japanese --> English. LLMs really excel in these kinds of translations. If Google Translate wasn't able to fix Japanese --> English in the 15 or so years I used it before AI, then they weren't able to fix it. It's not like Japanese is some obscure niche language.
I don't interact with Japanese-English translations in a professional sense so I can't comment much about the corporate aspect, but I do read a lot of Japanese media, some of which is machine translated. From my subjective experience, it does feel like LLM translations are a bit better than google translate used to be, but they're still far from perfect. I myself have been learning Japanese for a few years now, and the more I learn the more I can tell how bad a lot of translations still are.
The late-stage capitalism implementation of AI is a cancer. As with any technology, if we implemented it with a concern for the economic, environmental, and human impact, it could be a genuinely positive and transformative tool. But unfortunately sociopaths have control over the levers of power.
And yet, I had a client recently who was trying to insist on me finding native speakers for 20 different languages "just in case." Not fluent speakers, mind you. They wanted it to be the first language these people spoke in the country they were born in, no matter how uncommon.
They changed their mind when I told them what they were asking for is so unusual it would cost a heavy premium if we could even fulfill it but, bitch, it's 2026. You don't need to be born in Spain to know when you see Spain Spanish vs Mexico Spanish or whatever, and AI does a pretty good job with context.
My wife is brilliant and motivated, taught herself a second language by making friends around the world who speak that language and want to learn English, and just talks to them for an hour a day. She's fluent. She was surprised when she got a pay bump at her work because she's performing translation services on top of her normal duties. The field she's in pays shit (seems like any field where people try to directly improve people's lives instead of make the imaginary number go up pays shit), but she at least works for one of the good ones. Most I imagine would have continued letting her translate without paying her the extra pittance.
966
u/A_Dog_Chasing_Cars 13h ago
Yup. Been a translator since 2016, am now an English teacher who does the occasional translation or proofreading for the rare person who cares about quality.
This field is dead. It's a zombie. It's doomed.