The first piece of your work to go was gisting. Somebody used to send you a pile of documents in a language they couldn’t read and pay you to say roughly what was in them, so they could work out which ones mattered. Nobody buys that now, and honestly nobody should.
You saw this coming before the rest of us did, which is why I want to start the series with your trade rather than a safer one. That roles hollow out while the job title survives is not a new claim on this blog, and the only thing these thirty posts add is the specific trade instead of the general shape. So let’s be specific. The volume work is going. The first drafts are going. Somebody still has to decide what a sentence is for, and that part was never really about words.
The version going around is that you’re a proofreader now. There’s something in it. Post-editing pays less per word than translating and takes a strange kind of attention, and you can only do so much of it in a day before your eye stops catching things. But the squeeze didn’t start here. The memory discounts were already shaving your invoice years before any of this, the grid of percentages that decides a repeat is worth a fraction and a near match is worth a bit more than that. The machine walked into a trade that had already agreed, in writing, that some of your words were worth less than others.
Clients mostly don’t know this part. A bad translation used to announce itself. It arrived stiff and strange, and the client could see something was wrong even if they couldn’t say what. That was useful. The output you get now is smooth, confident, idiomatic, and every so often it has quietly dropped a negative or swapped a term for its near neighbor. Nothing on the surface tells you which sentence to distrust, so you have to read all of them properly, which is the tiring half of the job. You are being paid less to do the harder part.
One decision holds the whole of this trade, and I want to put it in front of you before anything else.
You’re going into a language with two words for you. One you’d use with a stranger, one you’d use with a friend. On an account you have had for years this is not a live question. It was settled once, it sits in the style guide or in the termbase, and you would have to go digging to find out who decided it. The live version is the new client, the file that landed on Friday, no guide, nobody to ask. The source has one word for you and nothing in it says whether this company talks to its own staff as adults or as employees. You won’t find the tone of the head office in there either. You put the question to them and it comes back as “either is fine.” It is never either. The same client will write in six months to ask why the handbook sounds like a letter from a bank.
A machine will pick one. It will pick consistently, at speed, with no idea it made a decision, and once that choice has run through a company’s handbooks and safety notices and internal mail, it is the company’s voice. That is register, the distance you keep from the person reading, and it isn’t a small thing to set by accident. Somewhere in that company a laminated card is screwed to the wall beside a machine, telling the man on the night shift to keep his hands clear, and it speaks to him the way a bank speaks to a stranger. Nobody chose that. It got chosen.
That is the shape of the whole job. The source text is not a brief. It’s one attempt at the thing, made by somebody with a different reader in mind, and your work is to notice what each sentence is doing and then find out whether it can be done that way over here. A safety instruction that assumes a building code the other country doesn’t have. A contract clause naming a remedy that doesn’t exist in the target jurisdiction. A line telling the reader to ring their family doctor, in a country where that isn’t how anybody gets seen. A joke, which has to be replaced by a different joke or dropped, and either way somebody has to decide. None of that information is in the source and none of it is in the target language. It sits with the person who has been in both rooms.
The machine is good, and the trade doesn’t always say so out loud. On clean, well-written, in-domain prose it produces something a tired human at the end of a long list would be pleased to have written. Saying otherwise in front of a client who can read both texts loses you the argument and some of your credibility with it. The trade’s real complaint isn’t that the output is bad. It’s that judging whether it’s bad takes a professional, and professionals are exactly what the buyer thinks they’re no longer paying for.
And I don’t want to leave you with the comfortable version of this, because the comfortable version is wrong. Saying that the interesting work survives is no use to somebody whose interesting work was subsidized by the boring work. The volume paid the rent. If the pile at the bottom goes, the top doesn’t stay where it was, it just gets more crowded. Some people reading this will not have a trade at the end of it, and it won’t be because they weren’t good.
It holds where being wrong costs money or gives offense, and it holds for a reason worth being clear about. It isn’t that the machine can’t produce the sentence. Often it can. It’s that somebody has to know what the sentence is for, who is going to read it, and what they’ll do next, and then be the person who settled it. Interpreting is a different trade with a different answer, and I’m not going to pretend I can cover both in one go. But the written version of this is a job about two worlds that can’t hear each other, and the words were always the smaller half of it.
The next time a client tells you either is fine, don’t let it go past. Write down which one you picked and the one line of reasoning behind it, and leave it in the file where the next translator will find it. Nobody is going to ask you for that line. It is still the only record anywhere of how that company decided to speak to its own people.
