How are companies using AI in the Translation & Localization Industry?
Today, while I sit down to write this post, I am thinking about all the newsletters I am receiving here on LinkedIn that seem to be written by #ChatGPT. AI can be a great tool to kickstart ideas and summarize complex subjects, but all these newsletters from the Translation and Localization industry are very same-y, very boring 💤 I am not even opening them, are you?
Although it can be quite tempting to ask AI to write or at least improve this post, especially because I am not an English native speaker myself, I won’t do it. At least not today.
If you work with translations, you are probably aware that artificial intelligence is being widely used to cut costs on translation work. We all know how capitalism works. But at what cost? Some might say we live in the era of the “good enough”, a concept most Gen X and Early Millennials struggle to grasp, as we learned to aim for perfection. But perfection in the current climate? It seems totally overrated. And good enough is much cheaper…
But, at Peel The Pineapple, we are not pessimists, we gotta move on, and figure out how we can adapt. This is why today I would like to enlighten you about how our industry has been using AI in combination with human linguists. From our point of view, we can see 3 fronts.
The AI ‘Sourcerer’ 🧙
Some companies are using artificial intelligence to write the source copy, and human translators to adapt its content. Although we can’t really point out why this choice was made, we believe that it might have some correlation with the fact that AI systems work more efficiently in English.
The AI Translator 👅
This is probably the most obvious choice, although it is not anything new for linguists, really. Translators have been editing copy translated by machines for a while. This is a service we call Post-Edit.
The Human Reviewer/Rater ⭐⭐⭐
By now, if you have been using #ChatGPT, #Gemini, #Meta AI or any other tool, you are probably familiar with ‘hallucinations’. This is how random (and wrong) responses from AI language models are being called. And that is the thing! AI may be great, but you might have to double-check your answer on Google!
LinkedIn job posts are jammed with AI raters vacancy, and many agencies are hiring translators to do this. Ah, the rates are not great, of course.
🗒️ As a side-note, the other day I was asking ChatGPT if some books have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, and I got a reply that they were, got names of translators, year of publication… And everything was WRONG. So, be careful. You might still need a human to check your facts!
The future? 🔮
At the moment, it is kind of difficult to say the future is looking bright, but we have been seeing a rise in transcreation jobs, like taglines, scripts, social media campaigns… In the end, being creative might be what will differentiate us from the machines.
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