What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.
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Is it that unfortunate? Tasks that don't require high-quality translation now don't need human labor. We should be celebrating.
The sad part is that we haven't figured out how to distribute our resources fairly to these people even thought their services aren't required as often. Instead we just take their wages and give them to the top 0.1%
It’s unfortunate because we are seeing more poor translations in all domains, and users suffer from it. It’s part of a general enshittification of things. There are few contexts where low-quality translations don’t constitute a degradation of user experience.
Just one amusing example I saw recently: On the Amazon website, a submit button labeled “Go” in English was translated to something which when translated back would be “Walking”. That’s the kind of thing that would be exceedingly unlikely to happen with a human translator.
On the other hand, a bridge sign that says "No entry for heavy vehicles" is unlikely to now read "I am out of office for the next 2 weeks" in Welsh: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5
Now instead it will say, in Welsh
"Switched to Opus 4.8 - Fable has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them."Hahaha that’s pretty funny. But in their defence perhaps if you didn’t want a tall tale you shouldn’t have asked for a Fable? ;)
This story is so great because it shows how robotic are so many jobs and tasks. Like, what happened in the reciepient mind to not consider whether the reply was appropriate or not? Did the almost instant response not hint at an automated email? Or the lack of any other content of the email (a greeting, something)? Or maybe people send so many emails or is doing so many thing they switch off certain parts of the brain?
I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. English translated from Chinese is famous for this.
There will never be enough expert-level human translators, and they tend to be very expensive. Machine translation has raised the floor.
> I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there.
This.
There was even a big controversy recently with one of the games on Steam where human translators just completely botched and vandalized the translation, mistranslating huge chunks of it and injecting their own personal politics which are not present in the original text (only English was affected; other languages were translated fine apparently): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/5028562...
If you'd get the AI to translate it, even without any editing, it would have done much better job. Just because something's done by a human it doesn't automatically make it good; you still need competent people at the helm, and recent machine translation advances certainly raise the floor on that.
I don’t agree that machine translation has raised the floor, because even LLM-based translation can get pretty bad when it isn’t provided with the necessary context. And the average quality level I’m encountering has dropped since machine translation became mainstream. Poor translations have become the norm, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago, despite the occasional “all your base are belong to us”.
if it was valuable, people would pay for it
That’s not how it works. Value for users doesn’t translate 1:1 into value for businesses, nor are either necessarily willing to pay for value. That’s why things enshittify.
if they are selling to a business, the biz will pay if it solves their problem. if the solution doesn't solve their problem, or something else solves their problem that is easier / cheaper / better, the business will not pay.