There's been a lot of discussion in the papers about how much AI will affect the world of work in the future. Well, translators have already seen their income plummet this year. Until last year, here in Germany, things were jogging along okay. A little bit down.
Since the beginning of this year? Catastrophic. Over a thousand euros a month down and heaven knows what's ahead.
Hopefully, potential clients will soon realise a few things:
1. These translation apps and the like can't recognise mistakes. I'm currently translating a text on Venice. For a magazine. I've discovered two mistakes in a not very long text: instead of a place being one square kilometre in size, the author has typed one square metre. Will so-called artificial intelligence pick up on this? And will it realise that the name Murano has been incorrectly typed as Murona at one point? I doubt it.
I even translated a discussion paper for a German ministry that had already been published online. I found one major mistake (a sentence with no ending) and two things that had been miscategorised. Again, these translation apps translate what is there, without thinking about what they are translation.
2. The translation app won't produce a text in a style that is right for the target audience. I've just translated some in-flight games for an airline company. I saw the PDF-files that showed the layout of the games. Someone had put in some text in English already - very probably using some free translation app. Oh, my! If you compare what they had inserted and the text that I finally ended up with after going through it four times, I'll think you'll agree that mine knocks the socks off any machine translation. The style of the writing in German was stilted and formal, not what you need for children's games, but that is how the English text ended up sounding, too.
In the meantime, while waiting for clients to be bitten in the arse and return to translation agencies and translators, I shall tighten my belt. Fortunately, my pleasures are modest.
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