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#anyway sorry I'll stop ranting about this now but learn some fucking nuance and stop being swept away by outrage culture
buildarocketboys · 2 years
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Basically, overuse of machine translation is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. If my company stopped using machine translation for everything today, would that stop translators being underpaid or force companies to only ever produce good translations? Absolutely not. We would still be paid the same, and probably still be expected to produce the same amount of work at the same rate, but this time without a useful tool to make our work go faster. And if we couldn't keep up to those rates or the quality took a dip because of it (and it would, if only because having to work even faster would introduce more errors), then companies would simply go somewhere else where prices were lower or where they still use machine translation or, worst case scenario, actually not bother using a translator at all and just use machine translation which is what people in that post are scaremongering about in the first place!! As with literally every other industry, capitalism is the problem, but that doesn't get solved by attacking one aspect that, while it can have disadvantages and be used to devalue translators' work, is also an incredibly useful tool when used correctly.
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