{"id":67702,"date":"2025-10-11T10:03:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T10:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/67702\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T10:03:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T10:03:06","slug":"translators-find-themselves-at-the-sharp-end-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/67702\/","title":{"rendered":"translators find themselves at the sharp end of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica Spengler\u2019s work as a translator is drying up. When new commissions do arrive they now often look more like proofreading poor-quality work than the specialised translation she has built a career on. The reason, she believes, is artificial intelligence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really grim,\u201d she says of the current jobs market. \u201cMore and more companies think, why should I hire somebody to do the work, if I can throw it through a program and pay someone much less to look over it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As employers explore outsourcing tasks to AI, translators are among the most vulnerable professions. More than a third had lost work to generative AI, according to a survey last year by the Society of Authors trade union. Four in ten said it had caused their income to fall.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last three or four years there\u2019s been a sea change,\u201d says Ian Giles, chair of the translator\u2019s Society of Authors branch. His own \u201cdry spell\u201d began six or seven months after the release of ChatGPT. \u201cAn awful lot of work has stopped coming\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I\u2019ve got a lot of colleagues who quietly bailed out of translating because you have to pay the bills.\u201d<\/p>\n

Automation has been creeping into translation for several years. The launch of Google Translate in 2010 brought the first big knock to employment growth in the profession, cutting the equivalent of 28,000 jobs in the US, according to estimates in the paper \u201cLost in Translation\u201d published this year. DeepL, a machine translation tool started in 2017, was used by 82 per cent of language companies last year, according to a US association representing the sector. <\/p>\n

But the arrival of generative AI is the biggest threat yet. Linguists were among the most endangered professions in this year\u2019s index of generative AI exposure by the International Labour Organization. In Microsoft\u2019s assessment of how workers used AI, interpreters and translators ranked as the most at-risk from automation.<\/p>\n

AI at work: how are jobs changing?<\/p>\n

This is part of a series of interviews examining how AI is reshaping different roles<\/p>\n

Part one: How AI is helping one doctor treat cancer<\/a><\/p>\n

Part two: Goldman Sachs bankers explore limits of AI<\/a><\/p>\n

Companies such as GlobeScribe.ai<\/a> promise \u201chigh-quality translation\u201d for just $100 per language, per book \u2014 a fraction of what a human would typically charge.<\/p>\n

Spengler, 52, who studied German and Jewish history and has specialised in translating books and documents linked to the Holocaust, says she uses DeepL occasionally \u201cas a tool, like I\u2019d use a dictionary\u201d. She says it is \u201cremarkably good\u201d \u2014 but the outputs can be deceptive. It can hallucinate. \u201cIf you just want to get the gist of something it can be fine, you\u2019ll get something very readable\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009but if the language is complicated or there\u2019s specific terminology, it falls down.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she is contacted for work now, jobs often involve correcting crude machine translations. \u201cInstead of going to a human translator first\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. they\u2019ll throw it through a machine translation and ask a human to correct it.\u201d The pay for these jobs is lower, and Spengler has so far turned them down when they are offered, though feels she is lucky to be able to do so.<\/p>\n

The shift has \u201cbasically done away with\u201d a great deal of commercial translation work, she says. Worse, she finds it \u201csoul destroying\u201d to be relegated to a proofreader of AI\u2019s attempts at work she is skilled at. Because she needs the source text to identify errors, it is no easier than translating directly. \u201cIn the end, it takes more time, energy, and could be more costly for clients in the long run to correct something a machine has translated badly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the Chartered Institute of Linguists, a UK organisation, says its members have reported a significant rise in this \u201cmachine translation post-editing\u201d. In a 2024 survey, nearly half of respondents reported a significant decrease in translation work, with a further 21 per cent reporting at least some decline.<\/p>\n

Spengler argues the sensitive nature of her field makes it inappropriate for AI: her portfolio includes books about why ordinary Germans carried out the Holocaust and materials for exhibitions at concentration camps.<\/p>\n

She says it was a \u201cgut punch\u201d when, a few months ago, a client asked her to create a glossary so they could translate a new website for a concentration camp memorial \u2014 using AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a long-term client \u2014 a steady source of income \u2014 and they wanted me to make myself obsolete,\u201d Spengler says, noting that it was very sensitive material. \u201cThey need to get it right.\u201d She refused the assignment, saying it felt \u201cdehumanising to expect a fellow human being to fix a machine\u2019s mistakes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Another time, an expert on a German sociologist asked Spengler to proofread a machine translation of her latest book. \u201cI tried to explain that you\u2019re not going to get anything readable from a machine translation for such complex work,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is when I realised that even my niche literary career is at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone in the industry is pessimistic. Karen Decker, former president of the Association of Language Companies, says workers and employers are using AI for monotonous tasks, such as flagging errors, speeding up admin and generating notes. \u201cWe feel like it amplifies our services,\u201d she says. \u201cWe still need the human touch.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I tried to explain that you\u2019re not going to get anything readable from a machine translation for such complex work<\/p>\n

Jarek Kutylowski, the founder of DeepL, says the tool has \u201copened up new use cases for translation, such as composing emails to clients or colleagues in different languages\u201d and is used by many professional translators who use it to \u201ctake on more projects and enhance their productivity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Giles suspects some work might return as clients begin to realise the limits of AI. Even Pedro Llanos-Paredes, one of the authors of the Lost in Translation paper, says its research does not show a \u201cjobs apocalypse\u201d. \u201cWe\u2019re going to lose certain skills but\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. it will allow translators and other professionals to focus on what\u2019s more important, the nuance and detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spengler believes there will \u201calways be a sort of boutique\u201d market for translation. But this type of work is sparse and often dependent on grants.<\/p>\n

Post-editing work will become more common, she says. \u201cYou have to decide now, are you going to do that or not, and if you\u2019re not, you have to take into account you might not have much \u2014 if any \u2014 work.\u201d <\/p>\n

Spengler does not plan to retrain \u2014 and hopes she can continue translating until \u201ca reasonable retirement age\u201d, even if just \u201cscraping by\u201d. Other options such as research, editing or archival work, are also threatened by AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But she is concerned for anyone starting out in the industry. With applications to language undergraduate degrees in the UK declining by more than a fifth between 2019 and 2025, a younger generation of translators appears to share those worries. \u201cThey will absolutely have to face this post-editing morass of bad texts to just get a foot in the door,\u201d Spengler says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jessica Spengler\u2019s work as a translator is drying up. When new commissions do arrive they now often look…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-67702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}