Last year, I met a young translator reinventing herself.
She studied Translation for five years at a local university. We met online by commenting and engaging on each other's LinkedIn posts. When we met, she was looking for another way to make money. Her agency cut down her rates and couldn't find her as many gigs as before.
Who to blame? AI!
AI isn't disappointing at translation. But it doesn't score A+
Her story came to mind when I started my own translation project, and I quickly understood why she was looking for another job.
Recently, I translated Street-Smart Coding to Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker, I could have done it easily myself.
But to make it faster, I used Copilot with a simple prompt. I specified a tone, voice, and style. Latin American conjugations and vocabulary instead of Spaniard ones, for example.
I was surprised by the results.
Copilot translated chapters with almost no fixes. Of course, there were places where the phrasing made it clear the text was machine-generated.
In English, we say "wear all hats" when someone has to do multiple tasks alone. Copilot translated word by word. The same expression in Spanish ("usar todos los sombreros") makes no sense at all.
Copilot struggled with coding terms like "parser combinators." In Spanish, we use a completely different term. Direct translation doesn't work either.
That's when I jumped in. But Copilot handled most of the job in just a couple of work sessions.
What if it isn't only translation, but coding too?
This made me rethink one of the lines I heard the other day:
"AI won't take your job. It will change your job description."
(Credits to Kevin Kelly)
AI may already be turning translators into proofreaders. Coders could be next. Maybe the world won't need as many coders, and coding may no longer mean typing symbols anymore. Who knows?
In any case, I predicted AI won't take our jobs by 2034. Let's see if I was right. In the meantime, I'd like to pick a DIY skill and double down on my creative and writing skills—just in case.
When AI generates code faster than any of us, you need more than syntax to stand out. That's why I wrote Street-Smart Coding, a roadmap to build hype-proof skills.
Top comments (1)
Translation has been a moving target for years... the use of AI to translate was an unforeseen advantage. But, as you say, there still must be a human taking care of fixing those parts that are not "automatic", I mean, which still have to do with human imagination.
There still exists the problem of AI hallucinations, or, more precisely, the resort for AI to invent a new reality instead of fixing the real problems (eliminating test cases, for instance).
The other day I was listening to an expert in automatic driving. He said that AI was in charge of driving the car, while a simpler, rule-based AI was in charge of verifying the main AIs driving. I imagined that the rule-based system was needed in case the driving AI decided to abandon the road in order to avoid traffic...