24
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
24 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2275 readers
33 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's also a lot less pleasant of a task, it's like wearing a straightjacket, and compared to CAT (eg: automatically using glossaries for technical terms) actually slows you down, if the translation is quite far from how you would naturally phrase things.
Source: Parents are Professional translators. (They've certainly seen work dry up, they don't do MTPE it's still not really worth their time, they still get $$$ for critically important stuff, and live interpreting [Live interpreting is definetely a skill that takes time to learn compared to translation.])
Could I ask you a question I’ve always wondered about the translation business? Why do people send in machine translation asking for cleanup and even expect it’ll cost them less?
Maybe I’m ignorant, but the way I see it, great machine translation tools are widely and freely accessible to anyone. If I needed professional translation done, I wouldn’t think copy-pasting a document into Google Translate – something that takes literal minutes – would get me any type of discount. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Some of it is driven by translation agencies, which will refer work to freelance translators.
I would say the biggest gap is that many customers aren’t even bothering to use translators at all, and the ones that do realize it needs fixing up don’t really understand the work involved, many people misunderstand translation as being a 1-1 process, and think that Machine translation got you most of the way there.
It’s also the are we willing to pay that much more, when the shitty translation is “good enough”.
One big issue is that translation as a low barrier of entry, and many people will accept stupid work at stupid rates, and to keep rates high you have to prove the added value.
(Proving the added value as also gotten harder, as some clients even more often than before will “correct” your work before publish it, as highlighted in the article)