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Thread poster: The LT>EN Guy
Beth Jones
Beth Jones  Identity Verified
Austria
Local time: 01:33
German to English
The industry's embrace of machine translation & CAT tools brought translators this economic misery. Sep 2, 2022

Thank you, Tanja. You speak some very important truths.
I am a translator who began in this once-respected profession for bi-lingual intellectuals back in the 1980s, before personal computers and the www. existed.

I can sadly attest that the economic decline of our profession has been brought about by our own deference to TRADOS, MemoQ & Co and our agencies' collaboration with them to pander to clients'... See more
Thank you, Tanja. You speak some very important truths.
I am a translator who began in this once-respected profession for bi-lingual intellectuals back in the 1980s, before personal computers and the www. existed.

I can sadly attest that the economic decline of our profession has been brought about by our own deference to TRADOS, MemoQ & Co and our agencies' collaboration with them to pander to clients' unwillingness to pay a decent wage for our hard-won expertise.

You know what the going rate for a DE>EN translation was in 1995-2000?
At least €1.00/ standard line, which (in case you’ve never heard of such a thing) was 55 characters long, which generally amounts to €1,00 per 7 to 10 words for the simplest texts. Even back then we earned up to 20 cents per word for technical texts.

Now? Sigh....

Translators were bilingual, professional writers and treated with the respect (and wages) paid to highly trained intellectuals.

Then came "machine translation" and CAT tools.

As most experienced translators are aware, such fallible, nuance-hostile, technical nannies impose hindrances and semantic limitations that distract busy freelancers from our real task. Unless you’re working in-house somewhere, CAT tools add to most freelancers‘ work loads, while depressing the prices we are paid for our needlessly increased labors -- all while we involuntarily train our always-inferior techno replacements.

This trend has reduced most translators to underpaid editors of Google Translate. The other price is that my younger colleagues often have no clue how to translate a document using nothing but the translation tool between their ears. They could rhetorically fly but, due to the compulsory use of electronic crutches, they can barely walk.

We all know that the flexible and creative human mind is much better-suited to evaluating and translating human communications than any robotic, bean-counting processor. That is why agencies now hire us for MTPE for half-pennies, to further improve our electronic successors while shoving us even further down (and eventually OFF) the economic ladder. It's just so sad.... ▲ Collapse


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