Going About a Storm that Can’t Be Ridden Out

An aspiring student and young professional navigate their translation and interpretation journey amidst AI’s runaway growth

27 July 2024 Seoul, South Korea – “I’m not that fond of English” Min Seo (pseudonym), an aspiring interpreter, lets out a hearty laugh. She makes no pretense about her moderate enthusiasm for the language she is going to live and literally, breathe.

The weather is so unpredictable it’s impossible to keep up: torrential downpours punctuate the day only to disappear in an instant, the glaring sun breaking through is soon swallowed by clouds.

So is this interview with Min Seo Park, a student at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and a long-time friend from my university years. One might expect someone with a passion for interpretation to have a corresponding zeal for English itself. It’s even more perplexing that she forged on with her decision in 2022—a time when ChatGPT hit the technological zeitgeist and Korean universities slashed or merged language departments in light of falling student demand.

“I love talking, which is why I dreamt of being a lawyer when I was younger.” Turns out impassioned courtroom drama takes up only a fraction of what lawyers do.

Then the pieces start clicking together. Clever wordplay, expressing logical arguments, moving hearts and minds through language: these are the ingredients that fuel her.

Min Seo was somewhat eager to part ways with English after graduating from university, that is, until serendipity yanked her into a sharp U-turn. “Topics in Literary Translation” was a course she signed up willy-nilly to satisfy her graduation requirements.

Everything fell into place.

It was the creativity. It was the delicate balancing act of staying true to the original text while tailoring the words for their intended audience. Yet the timeworn crossroads between passion and pragmatism loomed large. “AI will replace interpreters,” was the doomsday forecast that kept nagging at her.  

More than twice the distance across the pond from New York to London, Selena Ponce is currently balancing a similar conundrum in Valencia, Spain. A native speaker of Spanish and Valencian, Selena is a translator and interpreter who has taken on a flurry of commissions for NGOs and non-profits, holds several post-graduate qualifications, and has undertaken a slew of online courses on healthcare and women’s rights—her main areas of expertise. She continuously reaches out to organizations that align with causes she believes in and hopes to expand her services for women’s health, queer issues, refugees, and humanitarian work.

As fate would have it, Selena recently secured a job as a technical writer at a company fabricating turbomachinery for oil and gas infrastructure because commissions alone won’t pay the bills.

“I just hope that I will be able to live off of it and not have to have another job to support myself financially.”

AI complicates things a bit.

Even without AI, it was challenging for Selena to enter the market as a fresh graduate and started with unpaid projects. Nowadays, she is seeing a palpable increase in post-editing requests: commissions to review a text converted via machine translation; however, she accepts them at a cheaper fee.

“Translators are on a sort of dead-end with these kind of jobs because they feel like it is disrespecting the profession,” says Mireia Cabanes-Calabuig, Ph.D. candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, comparing the lower fee of post-editing tasks with translating firsthand text.

Whenever clients tell her not to burden herself with raw translation, Selena would rather start from scratch. Taking shots in the dark as to what the original text could have said is double the work. What’s more, there is the personal touch, an insignia that proves “it belongs to you.” As with artists, she adds, the human touch makes it special which is “much more attractive to me than what is computer generated.”

When prospects are said to be hazy, what still draws people to the profession?

Talk to someone about the work they love and their fierce drive will sneak out, often with an inspiring story to show for it. Growing up in the bilingual province of Valencia, Selena started learning English at the age of seven, picked up French in high school, and studied German at university. She became proficient enough to give lessons as a teacher and language assistant of French and German for primary and secondary school students—without once living in a country that speaks any of these languages. Her fascination preoccupies her everywhere. She admires wordplays from otherwise mundane texts, perks up her ears listening to interpretations just as she did watching the Paris Olympics, and sometimes goes, “great job!” when she comes across a satisfying piece of translation in a TV series. Behind every translated word in Spain, “everywhere you look, there is an international community awaiting at the other side.”

While passion certainly plays a role, there is a pragmatic reason. Selena believes humans have an edge in empathy, which is critical for fields like patient and refugee interpretation. And identifying irony, metaphor, and nonverbal cues is not, at least for now, an AI’s best suit.

Calabuig agrees there is room for improvement concerning conversational AI and accents, real-time contexts, or implied meanings. And the history of an individual’s life embedded in the culture is hard to ignore. Although AI can learn about culture, “the level of depth one person that has lived in that culture has is unmatchable by a computer (in fact, sometimes it is even fully unmatchable by a non-native speaker).”

When the translation softwares Trados and Wordfast were first introduced, there was much anxiety about their impact on the field. These softwares detect commonalities between previously translated text segments and the target text at hand. If there is a high percentage match, they generate translations duplicated from the former. But both are now part of any translator’s toolkit.

“The same will pass” with AI, Selena says, as Spanish crosses over to her English (the Spanish verb “pasar” or “to pass” means “happen” in English): a sign of different worlds mingling and coalescing. One of her most gratifying experiences is to extend this outwards, creating a bridge between people who would not have understood each other without her. At the same time, this warrants cautious optimism. “I don’t know what the future will hold…I do think we will have to eventually collaborate in some way, whether we want it or not.”

For Min Seo, a blog article cemented her hope: people know that medical robots can malfunction. Therefore, humans want human doctors to operate on them out of a desire for a sense of security and trust, even if not entirely rational. Similarly, we won’t fully trust a machine to mediate at high-level international summits unchaperoned. Certain interpreters will be displaced but the most qualified will always have a place.

Min Seo seems acclimatized to AI’s presence in school. “I can’t imagine how we would’ve done this without ChatGPT” is a stock phrase among her peers. Though professors cautioned its deceptively subtle slip-ups, ChatGPT is now a go-to point of reference. Word in the department is they will be installing a new “machine learning and coexistence” component to the curriculum. One of Min Seo’s professors working as an in-house translator shared that work is down, demand is down, and translation rates are down. On the bright side, things might just level off because AI boosts efficiency to churn out more work in the same amount of time, which means pay can stay the same or go up.

In the midst of the rapid-fire changes, there is still some analog element to Min Seo’s studies which inspired a spinoff hobby.

“I decorated it myself!”

Her prized possession: a top-bound navy blue notebook she DIY-ed with journaling stickers. The photorealistic clouds are so neatly arranged and blend naturally with the cover it’s hard to tell they’re hand-placed one by one. 

Her notes are patchy and sparse: jotting down complete sentences is a luxury in the whirlwind pace of simultaneous interpretation. Without time to flip between pages, she fills the front pages first and then moves on to the back. What’s more impressive, Min Seo starts conjuring up a speech verbatim out of those paltry words as if she sees invisible passages written in magic ink.

Yet an AI can remember every minute detail and cranks out translations in the blink of an eye.

There are still times when Min Seo questions whether there will be enough quality work to be done when she graduates next February.

But her level-headed realism is traced with a silver lining—the hope that each notebook will be a step closer to a stage where interpreters can flourish. If nothing else, perhaps one modest way to weather the elements, the vagaries of the times, is to piece together the turbulence one by one, with dedication and relish.