Lingua 5B wrote:
Believe it or not, despite having a lot of educated consultants, corporations are easily impressed if you present them with anything that will “cut down their costs”. They will just run for the cost saving part without much critically analyzing anything. Then they will see just the one side and ignore the other (such as problems, errors, time consumption, additional costs from such a solution).
I prefer not to laugh at presumably rather dumb corporations that welcome crappy solutions to cut down costs. I'm afraid they are a non-representative minority. Quite some people in my inner circle that work for a corporation tell me that DeepL is increasingly used for internal communication because they are impressed by what it already achieves (mind you: probably all internal corporation communication used to be translated by professional translators). Of course they still need a professional to deliver top quality translations, but make no mistake : awareness of the benefits of DeepL and the like is growing among end clients and that will inevitably influence our work rates in the future.
I'm not a fear-mongerer, I think translators will still have their place in a MT centered environment (and since two years I'm putting everything in place to make sure I still will be part of it by then), but I do believe that the majority of translators who refuse to adapt to this technology will be forced to leave the industry sooner or later.
My conclusion : we shouldn't laugh AI away, because it is here to stay (my calendar full of translation-related rhymes like these will be released soon). It would be better to monitor it closely and find ways to integrate it into your translation activity in order to survive in the longer term. Because that is at least my plan: if translation as we know it is to disappear (something I don't believe yet), I will go down with it until the very last second.
[Edited at 2022-12-06 12:29 GMT]