Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI

Summary

London — As a rare Irish-language translator, Timothy McKeon enjoyed steady work for European Union institutions for years. But the rise of artificial intelligence tools that can translate text and, increasingly, speech nearly instantly has upended his livelihood and that of many others in his field. He says he lost about 70% of his income when the EU translation work dried up. Now, available work consists of polishing machine-generated translations, jobs he refuses “on principle” because they help train the software taking work away from human translators. When the edited text is fed back into the translation software, “it learns from your work.” “The more it learns, the more obsolete you become,” he said. “You’re essentially expected to dig your own professional grave.” While workers worldwide ponder how AI might affect their livelihoods – a topic on the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week – that question is no longer hypothetical in the translation industry. Apps like Google Translate already reduced the need for human translators, and increased adoption of generative AI has only accelerated that trend. A 2024 survey of writing professionals by the United Kingdom’s Society of Authors showed that more than a third of translators had lost work due to generative AI, which can create sophisticated text, as well as images and audio, from users’ prompts. And 43% of translators said their income had dropped because of the technology. In the United States, data from 2010-23 analyzed by Carl Frey and Pedro Llanos-Paredes at Oxford University showed that regions where Google Translate was in greater use saw slower growth in the number of translator jobs. Originally powered by statistical translation, Google Translate shifted to a technique called neural translation in 2016, resulting in more natural-sounding text and bringing it closer to today’s AI tools. “Our best baseline estimate is that roughly 28,000 more jobs for translators would’ve been added in ...