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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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TechTakes
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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.
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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)