Comment by layer8
2 days ago
What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.
2 days ago
What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.
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
3 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.