I've done freelance translation in two different language pairs, for 20 years (mostly as a side thing). A few thoughts on this:
- Google Translate has always been garbage for professional translation work, which is why human translators have been needed.
- LLMs can write in a way that sounds native (at least in English), which is something that ML translation software was bad at. They can also understand context to some degree and can adopt tones. This is a huge leap forward that makes it suitable for a large majority of translation work _between common language pairs_ (Hindi to Thai is probably safe).
- The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature, and most cases, "decent" is good enough. Cost is prioritized over occasional mistakes. Prices have been falling for years already. Many agencies now pay peanuts because they expect you to use AI and "just" do some light proofreading. Except that often the "light proofreading" was actually "heavy editing" that often took more work than translating from scratch. It's not worth it.
- Do not lump translators and interpreters together when discussing this subject. Interpreters aren't going away and their job is much more difficult to replace with AI (for a variety of reasons). What they do is very different than translators (some do both of course).
- There are some exceptions to "decent is good enough", where: 1) context/localization is critical (a major advertising campaign), 2) accuracy of the message is critical (a government pronouncement), 3) linguistic excellence is critical (a novel). This may be the most visible parts, but also a very small fraction of the overall market.
My conclusion is that translators won't disappear altogether but their ranks will shrink considerably.
- Google Translate has always been garbage for professional translation work, which is why human translators have been needed.
- LLMs can write in a way that sounds native (at least in English), which is something that ML translation software was bad at. They can also understand context to some degree and can adopt tones. This is a huge leap forward that makes it suitable for a large majority of translation work _between common language pairs_ (Hindi to Thai is probably safe).
- The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature, and most cases, "decent" is good enough. Cost is prioritized over occasional mistakes. Prices have been falling for years already. Many agencies now pay peanuts because they expect you to use AI and "just" do some light proofreading. Except that often the "light proofreading" was actually "heavy editing" that often took more work than translating from scratch. It's not worth it.
- Do not lump translators and interpreters together when discussing this subject. Interpreters aren't going away and their job is much more difficult to replace with AI (for a variety of reasons). What they do is very different than translators (some do both of course).
- There are some exceptions to "decent is good enough", where: 1) context/localization is critical (a major advertising campaign), 2) accuracy of the message is critical (a government pronouncement), 3) linguistic excellence is critical (a novel). This may be the most visible parts, but also a very small fraction of the overall market.
My conclusion is that translators won't disappear altogether but their ranks will shrink considerably.