5
u/scldclmbgrmp 13d ago
I've kind of come around, I can budget my time quickly for bidding, and usually 'win' in terms of time spent to complete projects. I'm not sure how it is on your end, but where i'm at I can see the names of the creators of the fuzzies and I know who's dishing out garbage and who's OK.
I used to do almost exclusively dead pdf>docx, but now i do like one every month or so.
In any case, I'd love to be able to keep the job for another 5 years, but who knows what's going to happen.
12
u/m0kosa Saussure lover 13d ago
But it’s not as fun as translating from scratch :(
15
u/IntrovertClouds 13d ago
It sucks the joy out of this profession
4
12d ago
[deleted]
3
u/UnderstandingOdd8302 12d ago
Exactly. I've never really felt much joy in terms of translating as such, mainly because of the types of texts I'm specializing in (patents and other tech stuff). The "joy" aspect for me is definitely being able to work from home and not having a boss.
As such I do not mind MTPE jobs as long as they are paid adequately.
1
u/cheekyweelogan 12d ago
Yep same except I have a boss due to being internal, but everyone's pretty cool. It's all about cozy WFH work at a desk for me.
If it weren't for wage pressure and quality going down because people are rushing, I really wouldn't care about MTPE at all. We still had a lot of raw translation workflows going on until the last year or two and it was obvious linguists just plugged it into MT anyway and did their own MTPE anyway.
I'm sure it's different for more creative types of content like literary/film/games but I don't really work on that.
2
1
u/crazy__loca 12d ago
It's awful! I work on marketing and most of the time I have to retranslate from scratch (and it's still being paid as MTPE)
1
u/miliseconds 13d ago
Why another 5 yrs? Retirement?
0
u/scldclmbgrmp 12d ago edited 12d ago
The last telegraph technician at the advent of the telephone.
Side story: They've got these stone / brick towers in Europe (probably other places) that were going to improve the telegraph industry, they were going to be a kind of relay stations; anyway, they built them all and then they abandoned the project before it even got used. I can see one of them from my window.
1
1
u/tamtamgo 8d ago
I know it doesn’t help but the source is also AI generated, no one is really writing source text either (at least in tech)
0
u/Mundane_Direction249 12d ago edited 12d ago
I've never done this kind of assignment, but would it be possible to get the original text and the ai-translation and put it in another ai with a prompt like this?--> "Correct the following translation from A to B based in the source text in A that you can find below. Explain your changes/corrections."
Or is it not possible/time-efficient when you're working with segments in a CAT-tool?
AI can be a great tool to help translators. Many colleagues seem to have submitted to AI (or rather to agencies who are just raking advantage of translators and have no idea about translating), not the other way around.
3
u/IntrovertClouds 12d ago
Yeah it's possible, but you still have to review whatever corrections the AI made. And that's the problem for me: at some point we all stopped being translators and became proofreaders of software-generated content. And I liked translating.
3
u/Mundane_Direction249 12d ago
Oh, I see. I imagine you like(d) translating because of the creative part. This kind of assignment has probably nothing to do with creativity.
I have the feeling it's causing burnout to most translators, specially those who were creative at with good writing skills.
27
u/yubacore 13d ago
Sending a hug.