Did Machine Translation Finally Killed Translators Like Myself?

Did Machine Translation Finally Killed Translators Like Myself As Was Gleefully Predicted by Some Commenters Already some 15 Years Ago on My Blog?

I thought that it might do that soon, I really did, the arguments of MT enthusiasts seemed convincing, although I tried to counter them with my defense of, basically common sense, or human brain. Common sense was telling me that machines will never be able to think the way humans and translators in particular must be capable of doing to do their job properly. But to be on the safe side, I did file for early retirement when I was 64.5 instead of waiting until the “full retirement age”, which back then was 66.5 in United States.

Although the penalty for doing so was about 12 percent of the actual pension amount (if I remember correctly), I thought it was worth it, as the amount of work coming to me became a relative trickle after 2016 compared to the feast in previous years. I had to be realistic about my future.

I am now into the sixth year of my retirement period, and because my plan for a “post-working” period was very realistic, I don’t need to work at all as all my expenses are covered quite nicely by my pensions. This is partly because I am no longer married, my children are independent, and I live in a less expensive part of the world, compared to California or Virginia where I lived and worked for most of my life.

But although I work much less now that I am officially in retirement, I am still translating German and Japanese patents now in 2022, which is what I started doing when I lived in a small apartment on California and Seventh Avenue in San Francisco in 1987 …. or more than 35 years ago.

The fact is that although machine translation is incredibly sophisticated compared to what it was 30, 20, or 10 years ago, it is still not translation. It is still only a translation tool, a tool that to my old clients – and I only work now for old clients who have been sending me work for more than 20 years – is really not all that useful on its own. Although machine translation (MT), or artificial intelligence (AI) or whatever else we want to call is unrecognizable compared to the situation 35 years ago, it is still only a translation tool that DOES NOT PROVIDE AN ACTUAL TRANSLATION.

And I am still arguing, as I was 35 years ago, that it will never be able to replace human translators. Well, never say never, since I don’t know what may happen in future, but definitely not in my lifetime, which to me is the same as never.

I don’t know what happened in the meantime to the numerous schemes hatched by entrepreneurial translation agencies and would-be agencies that planned to use “post-editors” to massage machine translation into something that would more closely resemble human translation because I stopped following this issue more than a decade ago. My guess is that most of these outfits soaked up a lot of capital from new investors … only to go bankrupt after a while. This is not a way forward, as I was saying all those years ago because real “editing” would be even more time- and knowledge-consuming than an actual translation from scratch.

One thing that strikes me in the machine translation age on an emotional level is how this so-called artificial intelligence is a perfect fit for our new world in which truth, reality and real information, as opposed to vile propaganda, is no longer appreciated or even preferred. As a modern journalist or expert, you can lie as much as you want, it makes absolutely no difference how much actual truth or actual information is contained in your bunch of lies and how far actual information is stretched to fit the narrative. When the winds shift so that what you were saying yesterday is no longer tenable, you can just shift your explanations and instead of recanting yesterday’s truth, or lies to be more precise, you can just say that yesterday’s lies were marketing and that “the science has changed”.

Machine translation offers a perfect tool for an easy manufacture of ever changing shades of narratives. Just add in another mix of well sounding lies, mix it up further with a few semi-truths and then use a cool algorithm to arrive at a predetermined result.

The result may be very different from what you were saying yesterday, but hey, most people are so dumb, they won’t even notice, so as long as your bills get paid with the new, officially accepted truths an d algorithm, who cares.

Although my own example may show that human translators such as myself have not been killed off yet by machines with algorithms, It may be better to use machine translation for processing of information in our age than an actual human brain. It is definitely cheaper and there is no need to feel guilty about the resulting untruths and lies, when lies can be simply defined out of existence and called for instance yesterday’s marketing.