| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says Thread poster: Peter Motte
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| I have to disagree | Jan 17 |
Zea_Mays wrote: Gerard Barry wrote:
What you say about universities continuing to churn out tranlators is so true. It also applies to all universities offering humanities degrees and trying to convince the students (and everyone else) that the "skills" they learn studying, let's say English literature (to use just one example), are somehow going to be easily transferable to the world of work, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a lie. There is demand of people with humanities degrees in all sectors where you have to deal with people, for example in banks, because among other things they have better soft skills.
I disagree completely. Having a BA and MA myself, I never felt in great demand by employers. And what soft skills do humanities graduates have that graduates of other disciplines don't?
| | | | Michele Fauble 
United States
Local time: 22:46
Member (2006)
Norwegian to English
+ ...
| Count noun and non-count noun asymmetry | Jan 17 |
Christopher Schröder wrote: Tom in London wrote:
I don't know what "less people" are. Yes, you do. I think there are better ways of dealing with grammatical errors made by non-native speakers, such as ignoring them. Especially ones like this that are routinely made by most natives.
Fewer grapes
Less cheese
But,
More grapes
More cheese
This may explain why ‘less’ is increasingly used in place of ‘fewer’.
[Edited at 2024-01-17 16:40 GMT]
| | | | Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 07:46
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
IrinaN wrote: Lieven Malaise wrote:
Terribly translated manuals are manuals full of spelling, grammar and translation errors. I have never met anyone, including top-notch translators, who would return an excellent washing machine or a stove because of a poorly translated manual  . I have never heard of anyone being sued or dead exclusively because of a poorly translated manual. There are light years between "Oh, thank you, our wonderful translator, for pointing out that bad mistake" and an actual industrial emergency. We are very important but not that important I have never met a couple of modest middle-class retirees rushing out of a simple but clean and affordable B&B on the beach screaming "Honey, grammar and punctuation in their brochure are awful, we are moving to a waterfront Ritz now!" Will I ever skip a restaurant with hilariously translated but mouthwatering menu and a great chef? No, I'd rather advertise it as an extra fun on vacation.
Nice B2C examples. In B2B world, corporate lawyers can and will find any basis to create a fuss or just even a complain (because they can).
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[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
Inge Schumacher wrote:
Capitalism is the art of doing more with less to generate ever-increasing profits.
The Soviet Union had also high production goals - in socialist countries, Production was the No. 1 goal, and workers or departments etc. would get routinely punished for not meeting production quotas. Even if they didn't have the materials (with sometimes hilarious results).
The thing is that whatever can be automated, always gets automated (we all have washing machines, right?). And languages had been one of the top priorities in the tech world. I would recommend the lectures of Jaron Lanier, who has admitted repeatedly that "we destroyed translators - sorry guys" etc.
Expect a lot less available volume and fierce price competition until there's not really much left. It's not the first sector that had a wild run and then slowly diminished.
If you wanna be busy in the overall sector, you can find work to be busy. It's just that you'll work a lot longer hours for a lot less money. Kind of like graphic designers (they had their wild years too, just like we did).
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IrinaN
United States
Local time: 00:46
English to Russian
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I have no idea what B2C means
The point was missed in its entirety but I'll make another note anyway. I worked as an interpreter in hard hats and steel-toe boots, under any weather conditions, with walkie-talkie for comm and at times an oxygen bottle on my shoulder in the open quarries, on cargo ships, on service towers and in the vaults at the launch sites, in the hot shops etc so I know how safety works... No one is... See more I have no idea what B2C means
The point was missed in its entirety but I'll make another note anyway. I worked as an interpreter in hard hats and steel-toe boots, under any weather conditions, with walkie-talkie for comm and at times an oxygen bottle on my shoulder in the open quarries, on cargo ships, on service towers and in the vaults at the launch sites, in the hot shops etc so I know how safety works... No one is pushing any buttons or grabbing a tool or an instrument after reading a translated procedure arrived straight from the translator's computer . My level of "corporate lawyers" included Goldman Sachs and Brooklyn Attorney General's Office going after an international cybercriminal, not to mention oil giants' legal departments and auditing firms. Again, this is all beside the point.
If anyone who never stepped outside a comfy office or, at best, a white-collar environment, thinks that every translated page or a drawing for major industrial projects represents a sublime specimen of human linguistic and technical superiority, then you are leaving on the same cloud as those who believe that AI will be defeated miserably by humans on a grand scale and in the nearest future.
As if before AI all translations have been perfect and AI invented the bad ones... Only now it can be produced much faster and much cheaper, with much less paid labor involved, be it for higher or lower clients.
Everyone has a case in mind when a correction saved the day, right? Of course, we all do but then again, this is entirely beside the point.
[Edited at 2024-01-18 01:03 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Inge Schumacher
France
Local time: 07:46
Member (2023)
French to German
+ ...
I agree 100%!
[quote]IrinaN wrote:
A 64-dollar question is - should you advise your kid or a grandkid to become a professional translator today, will you be prepared to breastfeed him till your last breath? Times when any beginner could charge at least .12 USD without funny matches from the start (mind the cost of living back then) are gone, gone forever. So to heck with equality (there has never been any equality in any high-paying field), philosophy, and perfectionism for just one quick moment. Another question is - will "old-style" translation, praised by the oldtimers with 20-40 years of solid experience under their belts as an excellent source of comfortable living, remain a profession ensuring any kind of half-decent self-subsistence or at least survivability for a newbie trying to break into the translation market in 2023?
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 06:46
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| to answer your questions... | Jan 18 |
[quote]Inge Schumacher wrote:
I agree 100%!
IrinaN wrote:
A 64-dollar question is - should you advise your kid or a grandkid to become a professional translator today, will you be prepared to breastfeed him till your last breath? Times when any beginner could charge at least .12 USD without funny matches from the start (mind the cost of living back then) are gone, gone forever. So to heck with equality (there has never been any equality in any high-paying field), philosophy, and perfectionism for just one quick moment. Another question is - will "old-style" translation, praised by the oldtimers with 20-40 years of solid experience under their belts as an excellent source of comfortable living, remain a profession ensuring any kind of half-decent self-subsistence or at least survivability for a newbie trying to break into the translation market in 2023?
Q1 For only $64? I can't breastfeed. I'm a man. But I like the idea of funny matches. It's funny. As for equality, Bakunin said it is caused by inheritance (not by the price of translation): "Inheritance right, in my opinion, should be abolished, for so long as it exists there will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes - and the latter will always beget hereditary inequality in the development and shaping of minds, continuing to be source and consecration of all political and social inequalities. " I'm with Bakunin. We need a level playing field or there will never be equality.
Q2 I don't know if old-style (or any other style of) translation will survive as a profession, but there will always be a need for it unless one day I'm able to pick up a book in one language (e.g. by Bakunin, in Russian), but read it instantaneously in another. But I'm not sure that translation will be able to continue as a full-time profession.
[Edited at 2024-01-18 13:53 GMT]
| | | | IrinaN
United States
Local time: 00:46
English to Russian
+ ...
| Tom, that's where I am with you wholeheartedly | Jan 18 |
Tom in London wrote:
but there will always be a need for it
[Edited at 2024-01-18 13:53 GMT]
Just a very small one relative to the total volume of translation demand that, I hate to say, can live without, and that's where the battle for survival shall unveil
I constantly fight my own demons tearing me apart between the homage to be paid to perfect translations as the only kind having the right to exist, at least in theory, and the grim reality. When I take the side of AI, I don't take the side of AI, I just face the inevitable in terms of choices for feeding one's family in the long run.
Never in a million years I would have thought that there is even one single reason to be glad to be older. How about it! There is
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| The funny thing... | Jan 18 |
... is translators trying to defeat the machine, by producing the absolute best text they can. In reality, they are training the machine to be better!
All their great text is fed back into the machine. The lawful theft of any type of content by Silicon Valley machines is like that Chinese "finger trap" trick. The more you try to defeat it, the better you are training it.
| | | | | I somehow missed the anarchy boat when I was at the right age for it | Jan 19 |
Tom in London wrote:
"Inheritance right, in my opinion, should be abolished, for so long as it exists there will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes - and the latter will always beget hereditary inequality in the development and shaping of minds, continuing to be source and consecration of all political and social inequalities. " I'm with Bakunin. We need a level playing field or there will never be equality
And never read anything by the masterminds of anarchy like Bakunin or Prince Kropotkin, so today, I'm struggling to understand how one can be an anarchist in the first place: how they want to install anarchy (suppose it is through much violence) and organize things under it in terms of practical steps. I'm told, Bakunin wanted to abolish a lot of things besides the right of inheritance. Maybe my knowledge of history is too scanty, but I don't know of any experiments that tried to implement anarchy at a national level. I thought, 'wow, maybe we're about see an example of someone trying to implement libertarianism in South America,' and was kind of disappointed by certain news: it seems that libertarianism promoted by the new leader of the Land of Silver was just a facade hiding the real intention, which was to sell the country to the U. S. Libertarianism is another thing I could never understand even though I have listened to certain people who had some weight and claimed to be libertarians. One of them, when asked in which parts of the world a free person could live a full and happy life, named the U. S., Mexico and certain other parts of Latin America, and Switzerland, adding that the rest of Western Europe was only a good place to die in. I'm no longer following his content, unlike that of Prof. Noam Chomsky whose views on things are certainly more interesting than those of Dr. J. P. from Canada when the latter is talking about things like history, philosophy, and economics. And still I can't fully buy into said views and haven't heard Mr. Chomsky theorize at any length about his anarchist position (which he holds according to my information). Equality. Does it even exist behind all the clamoring? How can it be achieved in our profession?
| | | | IrinaN
United States
Local time: 00:46
English to Russian
+ ...
| On Bakunin, inheritance and life as one giant and never-ending paradox mocking us, mere mortals. | Jan 19 |
Bakunin’s contemporary, friend and fellow passionate czarism fighter and Marx and Marxism/marxists hater Alexander Herzen, who at the same time was fierce opponent of Bakunin’s drive toward anarchy, violence and terrorism, first supplied Bakunin some money for his first trip to Europe and then used his father’s, and later mother’s inheritance to finance numerous revolutionary activities, including Italian and Polish resistance (I use the term for simplification), support literary hungry ... See more Bakunin’s contemporary, friend and fellow passionate czarism fighter and Marx and Marxism/marxists hater Alexander Herzen, who at the same time was fierce opponent of Bakunin’s drive toward anarchy, violence and terrorism, first supplied Bakunin some money for his first trip to Europe and then used his father’s, and later mother’s inheritance to finance numerous revolutionary activities, including Italian and Polish resistance (I use the term for simplification), support literary hungry refugees from Russia, and publish The Bell (Kolokol) magazine, inviting Bakunin to be a part of it.
Herzen’s inheritance stemmed from the income generated under the Russian Empire laws protecting human ownership, which was pretty close to slavery but not quite, to be fair. His father was a rich landlord, and the land came with peasants inhabiting that land and working on it, hence the money. Herzen befriended James Rothschild to help free his family money arrested by the czarist government, and then kept learning from him how to invest it better. So, in a way Bakunin was a dreamer pursuing his dream to eliminate inheritance while occasionally living off of the inheritance one way or another😊. Life finds the way…
Am I trying to prove something or belittle Bakunin or Herzen in your eyes? No, heaven forbid. See the title😊.
By the way, I am a big fan of Herzen as one of the most brilliant and powerful polemists I have ever encountered. I may disagree with him now and then, he can even irritate me at times but I keep falling under his spell and coming back to his writings and our occasional imaginary fights. If only he could stay away from fiction writing
[Edited at 2024-01-20 00:51 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Peter Motte
Belgium
Local time: 07:46
Member (2009)
English to Dutch
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Always be carefull... | Jan 23 |
... when talking about philosophers and their ideas, because their ideas are often simplified, mostly for political reasons, and very often because people using the terminology just haven't read the book (!). Notorious case: Hitler talking about the Ubermensch.
Other case: Keynes and national debt.
As a matter of fact: marxism being introduced in former Russia was not in line with Marx's ideas, because he thought it would appear in industrialised countries, whereas Russia was... See more ... when talking about philosophers and their ideas, because their ideas are often simplified, mostly for political reasons, and very often because people using the terminology just haven't read the book (!). Notorious case: Hitler talking about the Ubermensch.
Other case: Keynes and national debt.
As a matter of fact: marxism being introduced in former Russia was not in line with Marx's ideas, because he thought it would appear in industrialised countries, whereas Russia was still a feodal state wich human laboured agriculture. It's highly debatable whether marxism ever existed in the SU.
[Edited at 2024-01-23 10:30 GMT]
[Edited at 2024-01-23 14:15 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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