AI killed translation
2025-08-21 22:08:16.788055+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Blood in the Machine: AI Killed My Job: Translators
Machine translation hasn't even improved. There was no big OpenAI moment. I'm starting to suspect it's an unhappy coincidence of sunk costs and economic downturn forcing us all down this path. And you know what? I started learning to code—needed something to do after all. And ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you've got the basics down and you're trying to do marginally more complex things—and you notice how quickly they lose track and fall apart, how needlessly complicated their solutions are, how your entire architecture turns into a mess of barely-functional spaghetti. Does this stuff work *anywhere*? My IT friends complain about being forced to use whatever hot new AI tool, and their companies stopped hiring junior positions. My own industry seems broken. After sending this mail, I'll have to do some tedious, underpaid post-editing. I'll hate it. Whoever will have to actually use the documents will hate it.
A thing I'm noticing is people putting together demos of things they don't understand. Use cases that nobody who's actually in that field would ever use. I think this is all further indication that we've elevated a class of people who don't do into decision-making, and the fact that they confuse language models with mental models also means they are completely out of touch with their customer base and use cases.