3 ms·

I can tell you I have worked as a translator and it used to be that the hourly rates were respectable. Nowadays you make the same as an admin assistant. Transl

I can tell you I have worked as a translator and it used to be that the hourly rates were respectable. Nowadays you make the same as an admin assistant. Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology. I ended up learning how to code and I am working on something now that uses language and programming (NLTK)and oddly, I found programming to be much easier than learning languages (I speak 6 human languages ) because it is a lot more predictable, stable and less dependent on context. Translators should learn how to code. There is a lot of demand now for people who can do NLP.

davidf18 10y ago
> "I speak 6 human languages" Impressive!
geomark 10y ago
"Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology." For some language pairs that is true. And that's one reason people aren't willing to pay decent rates for human translation. But for other language pairs machine translation produces nonsense. I've run a small translation agency addressing one of the latter language pairs and have stopped focusing effort on building it since there aren't enough customers willing to pay for decent translations. I even get people who send me text that came from automatic translation and ask me to proofread it, saying it should be quick and low cost to do so because it is "already translated". In fact it is worse than starting with the original and doing the translation because it is mostly nonsense.
- whatevorama 10y ago
  I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't need super exact translations. What I meant by my comment was that it used to be that knowing many languages was a valuable skillset, i.e. "you can get a job easily". That is no longer true. One reason for that is the rise of "translation agencies" which have taken a big chunk off of the pay rate. I am learning Chinese and a bit of Russian but it will take about three years to become fluent in these two since the alphabets are different. Translation gave me the ability to see abstract patterns in text which is something I only realized when I was randomly attacked by what appeared to be bots on Quora. I could tell the language patterns buried underneath the non-sense and I could see through their code. This was useful but unexpected. That is when I realized that language is related to form (syntax) as much as it's related to meaning and that's how it is connected to programming (or how I experienced this connection, I am not sure if there is an "official" explanation somewhere).

davidf18 10y ago

> "I speak 6 human languages" Impressive!

geomark 10y ago

"Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology." For some language pairs that is true. And that's one reason people aren't willing to pay decent rates for human translation. But for other language pairs machine translation produces nonsense. I've run a small translation agency addressing one of the latter language pairs and have stopped focusing effort on building it since there aren't enough customers willing to pay for decent translations. I even get people who send me text that came from automatic translation and ask me to proofread it, saying it should be quick and low cost to do so because it is "already translated". In fact it is worse than starting with the original and doing the translation because it is mostly nonsense.

whatevorama 10y ago
I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't need super exact translations. What I meant by my comment was that it used to be that knowing many languages was a valuable skillset, i.e. "you can get a job easily". That is no longer true. One reason for that is the rise of "translation agencies" which have taken a big chunk off of the pay rate. I am learning Chinese and a bit of Russian but it will take about three years to become fluent in these two since the alphabets are different. Translation gave me the ability to see abstract patterns in text which is something I only realized when I was randomly attacked by what appeared to be bots on Quora. I could tell the language patterns buried underneath the non-sense and I could see through their code. This was useful but unexpected. That is when I realized that language is related to form (syntax) as much as it's related to meaning and that's how it is connected to programming (or how I experienced this connection, I am not sure if there is an "official" explanation somewhere).