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Timothy McKeon is a rare Irish translator who has enjoyed many years of steady work in European Union institutions. But the rise of artificial intelligence tools that can translate text and, increasingly, speech almost instantly has forever changed the lives of him and many others in his field.
He says he lost about 70% of his income when the EU translation job disappeared. Currently, the job available is polishing machine-generated translations, a job he turned down “on principle” because it would help train software that would take the jobs of human translators. When the edited text is fed back to the translation software, “the translation software learns from your work.”
“The more you learn, the more outdated you become,” he says. “You’re basically expected to dig your own professional grave.”
This is on the agenda as workers around the world ponder how AI will impact their lives. With the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, that question is no longer a hypothesis in the translation industry. Apps like Google Translate are already reducing the need for human translators, but the increased adoption of generative AI will only accelerate that trend.
A 2024 survey of writing professionals by the British Writers Association showed that more than a third of translators lost their jobs to generative AI, which can create sophisticated text as well as images and audio from user prompts. and 43% of translators say their income has decreased because of technology.
In the United States, we analyzed data from 2010 to 2023. Karl Frey and Pedro Llanos Paredes of the University of Oxford showed that growth in the number of translator jobs is slowing in regions where Google Translate is heavily used. Google Translate originally used statistical translation, but in 2016 it transitioned to a technology called neural translation, resulting in more natural-sounding text and bringing it closer to today’s AI tools.
“Our best baseline estimate is that without machine translation, there would have been about 28,000 additional translator jobs,” Frey told CNN.
“This is not a story of a mass evacuation, but I think it’s very likely that something will follow.”
The story is similar globally, McKeon suggests. He is part of the Guerrilla Media Collective, an international group of translators and communication professionals, all of whom say they are supplementing their income with other work due to the influence of AI.
Christina Green is the president of Green Linguistics, a language services company, and a court interpreter in Wisconsin.
She worries that her role in the courtroom could soon disappear because of a bill that would allow courts to use AI and other machine translation in civil, criminal, and certain other cases.
Greene and other language experts have been fighting the proposal since it was introduced in May. “The entire country is looking at Wisconsin as a precedent,” Green said, noting that opponents of the bill have been successful in blocking it so far.
Greene still works for the courts, but her firm We recently lost a major customer, a Fortune 10 company. She said she decided to use a company that provides AI translation. Instead. That customer accounted for such a large share of her company’s business that she had to cut staff.
“People and businesses think they’re saving money with AI, but they have no idea what that is, how privacy is affected and what the implications are,” Green said.
Based in London, Fardas Babu works as an Arabic translator and interpreter for international media organizations, including CNN. she saw There has been a significant decline in writing activity in recent years, which she attributes to advances in technology and the financial pressures news organizations face.
Mr. Bahbouh is also studying for a PhD with a focus on the translation industry. Her research shows that technology, including AI, is having a “huge impact” on translators and interpreters.
“I am very concerned that the government is not doing enough to help them move on to other jobs, which could lead to increased inequality, workplace poverty and child poverty.” she told CNN.
Ian Giles, a translator and president of the Association of Translators, says many translators are actually considering retraining “because translation isn’t generating the income it used to.” British Writers’ Association. The situation is similar in the United States, where many translators are leaving the profession, Andy Benzo, president of the American Association of Translators, told CNN.
And Kristalina Georgieva, president of the International Monetary Fund, said at Davos on Thursday that the number of translators and interpreters at the fund had been reduced from 200 to 50 due to increased use of technology.
Babu argued the government should also do more for those who remain in the translation industry by introducing stronger labor protections.
Despite advances in machine translation and interpretation, technology cannot fully replace human language workers Not yet.
Benzo said using AI tools for day-to-day tasks like giving directions is “low risk,” but in the diplomatic, legal, financial and medical fields, where the risks are “very high,” human translators will likely need to be involved for the time being.
“I’m a translator and a lawyer, and in both professions, the nuances of each word are very specific, and[large-scale language models to power AI tools]aren’t here yet,” she said.
Another area where machine translation tools have had relatively little impact is literary translation.
Giles is I translated commercial novels from Scandinavian languages into English and supplemented my income with corporate translation work, but that is no longer the case. Meanwhile, requests for literary works continue.
According to Oxford University’s Frey, there is one key element of communication that AI cannot replace. It’s a human connection.
“Just because machine translation is widespread doesn’t mean you can build a relationship with someone in France without speaking a word of French,” he says.
