[sshine]

My mom retired as an independent translator 5 years ago.

She worked freelance 40 years from age 25 to age 65.

In the 15 years that preceded her retirement, she would get less and less work.

Partly she's an introvert who relies on her network to provide work, and her network gradually retired.

But machine translation was the big killer.

Before LLMs, the early versions of Google Translate killed paid translation.

As the market adapted to machine translation, and as the internet became a globalised platform for knowledge work, it also opened up to lower grade translation, and there were suddenly many more translators willing to work at a lower wage.

Prior to Google Translate there were semi-automated systems that would fuzzy match from large databases.

But it'd still rely on a human-in-the-loop for adapting the sentences.

With Google Translate you'd get a super sketchy translation out, very crude and not at all correct or idiomatic in the target language. Any distance between the source and target language (e.g. English -> Chinese) and it'd be one big joke. With plain Google Translate it still is. But the market spoke: Probably you don't need a very good translation most of the time. Especially not if the shitty one is free.

In her later years she moved to transcription of board meetings. She'd type up everything that was said.

I work for a company now that automates transcription via the whisper model and generates summaries that can be adapted by the customer. You pay per minute of transcription, and you can regenerate summaries as much as you want after that until your prompts give the right results.

All of this manual labor that provided for my childhood is gone now.

I couldn't imagine being a professional translator today and not use AI extensively.

But unless I have a legal reason to consult with a professional translator, I probably don't even need one, since LLM-based translation is as good as it gets with just plain LLM usage, and near perfect with automated translation tools that will help you pick both the mood, formality and alternative formulations for your translation.

High-grade translation is massively parallelisable, and a human-in-the-loop is entirely for final proof-reading.