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There are three 'markets' for translators: * Verbal translation, where accuracy is usually important enough to want to also have a human onboard since humans s
by yyyk 4y ago
There are three 'markets' for translators:
* Verbal translation, where accuracy is usually important enough to want to also have a human onboard since humans still have an easier time with certain social clues.
* High-culture translation, where there's a lot to personal choice and explaining it. GPT can give out many versions but can't yet sufficiently explain its reasoning, nor would its tastes necessarily match that of humans.
* Technical translations for manuals and such. This market will be under severe threat from GPTs, though for high-accuracy cases one would still want a human editor just in case.
All in all, GPT will contract the market, but many human translators will be fine. There's still areas where you'd still want a human, and deskilling isn't a bug threat - a human can decide to immerse and get experience directly, and many will still do so by necessity.
- jll29 4y agoA Chinese washing machine manufacturer may not hesitate to use MT (Google Translate, chatGPT or otherwise) to translate the instruction manual to English. In some cases, the quality may not go down or even go up (we've probably all seen some pretty bad human translations). "AI" is not the only automation that threatens translation jobs: translation memories (plain ol' databases that remember past translations) have killed a lot of business for human translators, namely re-translating new versions of products, where not a lot has changed. Nowadays, they only get paid for the sentences that were modified compared to the previous version ("the diff"). SDL Trados is an example of this simple approach that is extremely effective, and used heavily e.g. by the European Commission's translation service.