When I was at OSU, a lecture parallel to mine was on "AI and the Future of Translation/Interpretation." The lecturer was severely out of touch. When I engaged him about entertainment translation he referenced the 25 year old "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme as evidence our jobs were secure. - ThreadSky

zackdavisson.com • 111 days ago

When I was at OSU, a lecture parallel to mine was on "AI and the Future of Translation/Interpretation." The lecturer was severely out of touch. When I engaged him about entertainment translation he referenced the 25 year old "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme as evidence our jobs were secure.

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notruescottman.bsky.social•111 days ago

Did he somehow miss the several startups and major publishers already actively trying to replace human translators with AI, quality be damned?

zackdavisson.com•111 days ago

He wasn't even aware of them. His sole focus was his own specialty, doing court translation during criminal trials. Which.... fine. You will need humans for that for the foreseeable future. But it is such an absolute edge case.

He was just completely out of touch.

umbralm00ds.bsky.social•111 days ago

oh fucking jeeze!

zackdavisson.com•111 days ago

Absolutely the worst Ivory Tower syndrome. He was so smug about how machine translation could NEVER replace humans and dismissive when I told him that the already were. He focused on extreme edge cases in legal translation that, yes, will preserve a handful of jobs. But those are rare.

zackdavisson.com•111 days ago

I found this to be disingenuous to a room full of students paying good money to learn how to be translators. Especially when he admitted to using Google Translate on a recent trip to China and it was "good enough." His blinders are fully in place.

oksohearmeout.bsky.social•111 days ago

Many careers in the US are tied to the ADA, and we now have a sitting President who wants to ensure anyone that is not a straight white male is not protected by the law anymore. I predict he will go after the ADA by the end of the year, and translation services will no longer be legally required.

zackdavisson.com•111 days ago

I pointed out that when "good enough" was free, most would choose that and not pay the surcharge for "excellent. "

alittlebitofwhimsy.itch.io•111 days ago

It's the same mentality people took about ATM's and liek yes it took a couple of decades for the ATM to replace the bank teller but I can show you a lot of bans now that have zero tellers and dozens of ATM machines.

alittlebitofwhimsy.itch.io•111 days ago

You saw it with computers and the secretary. We still have secretaries/office admins but they are a fraction of a fraction of the number that existed pre-office computers.

zackdavisson.com•111 days ago

Exactly that. There will always be a need for a few, but those are thin slices of a constantly shrinking pie.

wolfesghost.bsky.social•111 days ago

The legal profession is pretty much right at that point.

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