Best of Both Words is a newsletter for language workers, community organizations, neighbors, and kinfolk about the evolving landscape of language justice. It’s an act of refusing binary, either/or thinking when it comes to language and the social relations that languages express. Best of Both Words is an engagement with the ways that this world is in dire need of language justice, and the ways that people are fighting to build it.

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This month, we’re dipping into the waters of AI and translation.

I recently saw a LinkedIn post from a translation agency complaining about the critical reactions by many translators to AI. The company was expanding its hiring for machine translation post-editing (MTPE) for AI-produced translations, and they were receiving comments from freelance translators that AI is accelerating the race to the bottom in terms of pay and working conditions. Some responded to the post, writing that concerns about AI must be from out-of-touch, stubborn, or simply irrelevant translators. 

A lot of nuance is missing in discussions about the mixed reaction by translators and others to AI. The ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA¹ strikes in Hollywood shed some light on the basis for such concerns.

Here’s the TL;DR version:

Studios are using the pretext of streaming and AI to overhaul the production process and the balance of power between management and workers (writers, actors, etc.). For example, the studios are fighting to limit how many writers they hire and how long they retain writers on staff. Writers fear that studios ultimately want the norm to be like a Hollywood version of MTPE: AI produces the scripts, and studios pay one lone writer to edit them so they sound more human. This future would have all kinds of repercussions: fewer jobs for writers, lower pay for the remaining jobs, fewer opportunities for non-white, younger, and differently-abled writers to enter the industry, and, thus, diminished representation in a Hollywood already struggling with diversity.  

So, what do the Hollywood strikes and translators’ complaints about AI have in common?

Translators, writers, and many other categories of workers are facing the contradictory nature of technological innovation in capitalist society. On the one hand, for big translation agencies, firms that rely on translating large volumes of documents, etc., as well as large Hollywood studios, streaming behemoths like Netflix, etc., technology is the means to replacing human labor and minimizing how much money they spend on wages/services. Why else would Hollywood be going through a “hiring boom” in the middle of a writers strike, while workers resort to side hustles to make ends meet?

On the other hand, technological advances can be (should be) liberating for human labor. AI has the potential to make our labor easier without making it more boring, expand the creative powers we use in our work, decrease the amount of time we spend at work so that we have more leisure time, and more.

In short, many freelance translators (who, despite all the rhetoric about “entrepeneurs” and “small businesses,” are actually just precarious workers) are grappling with the desire for meaningful, creative work that doesn’t come at the expense of our health, well-being, and social connectedness.

So I, for one, welcome all the naysayers and killjoys whose complaints about AI are getting the side-eye in some professional spaces. They’re helping carve out space for serious conversations about the power that language workers collectively (should) have over our working conditions, pay, and futures.

1. WAG refers to the Writers Guild of America; SAG-AFTRA refers to the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. ↩︎

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Translation in the spotlight…

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