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> Translators are busy

No they're not. They're starving, struggling to find work and lamenting AI is eating their lunch. It's quite ironic that after complaining LLMs are plagiarism machines, the author thinks using them for translation is fine.

"LLMs are evil! Except when they're useful for me" I guess.



Simultaneously, if you hire human translators, you are likely to get machine translations. Maybe not often or overtly, but the translation industry has not been healthy for a while.


The industry is sick because everyone is looking for the lowest prices, but translators don't like machine translation. They don't want to just review the output, because actually doing the translation leads to better understanding of what they have to do.


A machine translation might be useful just to get a bulk-mode translation of unfamiliar words and possibly idioms too. But then it's time for humans.


I would expect there not to be a meaningful number of "unfamiliar words and idioms" to a professional translator.


I would expect that many professional translators have native fluency in only one language.


I think using translation software or AI images comes down to the ease of working with the system vrs a human. For example, I've created placeholder images for various pieces of work. The images didn't bring in any revenue; they were throwaway pieces, so I didn't give a shit. It wasn't worth paying a human for it.

Before I had AI-generated images, I either left out images from the work or used no-copyright clip art because, again, it wasn't worth arguing with or paying a human to do it.

When it came to diagrams, before Excalidraw, I would dust off my drafting skills, draw something on paper with colored pencils, take a picture of it, and use the picture as the diagram. In this case, I was willing to argue with and pay myself.




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