Poll: Where can human translators offer the most irreplaceable value in the age of AI? Tópico cartaz: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Where can human translators offer the most irreplaceable value in the age of AI?".
This poll was originally submitted by WordAnt. View the poll results »
| | | | Enrico Zoffoli 
Itália
Local time: 00:32
Membro
alemão para italiano
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| Advanced Source Content Optimization | Jul 22 |
Flagging sustantive errors in the source I would say.
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Certified and sworn translations...
| | | | Zea_Mays
Itália
Local time: 00:32
inglês para alemão
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I'm involved in a project where an agency reverted their experimental AI approach and opted for human translation for quality reasons, a pure QED situation.
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| In subtitling and transcription. | Jul 22 |
AI may perform well with clear, standard speech, but it still struggles with strong regional accents, dialects, overlapping speakers, poor audio and cultural nuances.
Human professionals bring the listening skills, contextual understanding and editorial judgment needed to produce reliable subtitles and transcripts.
As it happens with translation, subtitling is not simply speech recognition, it is interpretation under constraints.
| | | | | The question sounds desperate | Jul 22 |
And it's asked from a wrong point of view. Human translators are irreplaceable because they're humans. The problem is that 99,99% people are unable to understand it. They're genuinely convinced that artificial imbecillence is a kind of a divine spirit that can think and understand things, knows all the languages, all the answers and all the questions. They're also unaware of how it works and unable to properly assess the quality of what it displays. The artificial god says so, so it MUST be true... See more And it's asked from a wrong point of view. Human translators are irreplaceable because they're humans. The problem is that 99,99% people are unable to understand it. They're genuinely convinced that artificial imbecillence is a kind of a divine spirit that can think and understand things, knows all the languages, all the answers and all the questions. They're also unaware of how it works and unable to properly assess the quality of what it displays. The artificial god says so, so it MUST be true, full stop. They even believe it chats with them. The proper question we need to ask ourselves is: is the industry making us compete with a string of electric pulses actually worth it? I said 'no' and chose to give up translating - or, actually, MTPEs as this is what this profession turned into - by the end of this year. It's not easy at my age, but it's the best I can do. Let them feed their contracts, medical records and other confidential writs to servers located hell knows where and accessed by hell knows whom. Good luck, I don't care any more. ▲ Collapse
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I recently had an unusual experience: an agency that forbids translators from using AI, GT, DeepL and MT, but then mainly sends them MTPE jobs. Is this a paradoxical "circular economy"?
| | | | Mario Chávez
Estados Unidos
Local time: 18:32
inglês para espanhol
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| Excellent writing skills | Jul 22 |
Writing, you ask? Everybody knows how to write. To write superbly in two or three languages, for different kinds of readers and in different specializations, takes many years, decades to master. No LLM (which costs several times what it cost to educate a human being in professional writing) can match that, now or ever.
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Daryo
Local time: 23:32
sérvio para inglês
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| You could add slang to the list | Jul 22 |
expressisverbis wrote:
AI may perform well with clear, standard speech, but it still struggles with strong regional accents, dialects, overlapping speakers, poor audio and cultural nuances.
Human professionals bring the listening skills, contextual understanding and editorial judgment needed to produce reliable subtitles and transcripts.
As it happens with translation, subtitling is not simply speech recognition, it is interpretation under constraints.
You could add slang [and even le français familier] to the list - the most 'entertaining' translations I've seen came from translators who never lived in the country of the source language and only understand the most formal academic version of the source language. Especially the case with subtitling movie ... From the AI generated subtitles I had to endure few times, AI is about as much useless.
Also, even with 'clear, standard speech' AI can easily the thrown off-balance by the slightest ambiguity, of the kind that wouldn't create any problem for humans with real-life experience. For AI words are most literally 'just words'.
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I don't know what any of the other answers mean.
But to address the question: the only "irreplaceable" thing human translators (may) have presently is certain kinds of highly specific knowledge of a subject, person or place. I mean down to the level of "We don't play darts/tell silly jokes/eat raw carrots/... in this village/company/household."
I only have personal experience of ChatGPT, but over the last few years it has developed the ability to pick up on nuances of l... See more I don't know what any of the other answers mean.
But to address the question: the only "irreplaceable" thing human translators (may) have presently is certain kinds of highly specific knowledge of a subject, person or place. I mean down to the level of "We don't play darts/tell silly jokes/eat raw carrots/... in this village/company/household."
I only have personal experience of ChatGPT, but over the last few years it has developed the ability to pick up on nuances of language that I would not have thought possible when it was first activated.
It still has a very poor sense of humour, but that's only a matter of time. As is the rest. Five years, maybe. At most. ▲ Collapse
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Daryo wrote:
You could add slang [and even le français familier] to the list - the most 'entertaining' translations I've seen came from translators who never lived in the country of the source language and only understand the most formal academic version of the source language. Especially the case with subtitling movie ...
That's one of the reasons why I only translate into my native language. Colloquial Portuguese (EU), slang, regional accents, dialects and cultural references are part of my everyday life, and that familiarity helps me capture the meaning, tone and intent when translating audiovisual content.
Also, I agree that exposure to everyday language is essential, but I don't think it's simply a question of whether someone has lived in the source-language country.
I've also seen the opposite happen. Just yesterday, a Portuguese translator living in the UK suggested an overly literal translation of a song lyric.
If someone actually said that to their partner in Portugal, they'd probably burst out laughing. Naturalness comes from understanding how people really speak, not just where you live.
[Edited at 2026-07-23 09:09 GMT]
| | | | William Bowley
Reino Unido
Local time: 23:32
espanhol para inglês
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Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida wrote:
I recently had an unusual experience: an agency that forbids translators from using AI, GT, DeepL and MT, but then mainly sends them MTPE jobs. Is this a paradoxical "circular economy"?
I've seen several agencies use that approach. I expect they're selling MTPE as human/manual translation to their clients at a higher price to separate themselves from cheaper competitors.
As you suggest, you see agencies use MT with either an extremely similar or the same output as that from any number of openly-available sites. One clear benefit of MT I've seen though has been removing some of the lowest performers, where MT has shown to be an improvement on their work. Unfortunately though, by the same token, passable MT improves the average quality of low-performers' translations to the point that they may appear to be usable linguists when in reality they aren't anywhere near.
As with anything, there's no substitute for quality translations by a human with genuine language ability. It is disheartening to see society's recent general disinterest in quality. One particular issue I have is seeing interviews where you know exactly what they've said, down to the word in Spanish or Portuguese (in my case), simply based on the almost-incomprehensible English output full of overly-literal translations and/or errors that has been used as "good enough".
[Edited at 2026-07-24 10:38 GMT]
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