I apologise in advance for sticking my oar into the great “future of translation and technology” debate, and would just like to make clear that this is an opinion piece only!
Every freelancer, indeed everyone in the industry, must have been exposed to a fair amount of material on the subject.
Given my resistance to some newer technologies, mainly Smartphones and social networks, my natural inclination is toward concern about the prospects for human employment in translation and interpreting in the context of increasingly sophisticated machine translation (MT).
To paraphrase from a classic film: that MT is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it absolutely will not stop…EVER, until you are redundant!
How do we, mere flesh and blood translators, compete with that? Well, I did also manage to find some reasons to be cheerful (but only two – apologies to Ian Dury).
– an old chestnut, for sure, but MT is not a replacement for human translation unless the client is only looking for a rough idea of meaning. And that’s something in my more than 15 years in the job that I’ve never been asked for.
Of course AI is raising the quality level of MT output, but until it really resembles the human mind, it seems to me the work lost to us humans will remain marginal.
-There is more content to translate! Thanks to new information and communication technologies, Writers, film producers, and yes bloggers or vloggers are swelling the amount of material potentially available for translation. So even if MT can nibble into the bottom end of our market in terms of supply, demand is booming.
Which reminds me, I’m sure I had some work to do…
