Eye witness report from the chair of FIT North America

I participated in the LocWorld49 conference in Malmö, Sweden (https://locworld.com/events/locworld49-malmo-2023/#overview) representing FIT.

Here are a few highlights:

On June 8th at 10 am Malmö time, there was a plenary session on “hybrid intelligence” and the “language industry”. Please see the photo I took from the audience.  From left to right you see:
Georg Kirchner
Alon Lavie
Jaap van der Meer
Peng Wang (moderator)

Predictably, there was a lot of discussion about ChatGPT and its possible impact on the language services sector.

Mostly the panelists were cautious in making predictions. However, Mr. van der Meer, the head of TAUS, made the following claim:

“The translation industry will disappear.”

He even gave a timeline: “within ten years”.

He referred to a 2021 article he published in Multilingual Magazine. In this article he notes a tension between traditional translation by professional translators (expensive) and raw machine translation (nearly free). And at LocWorld he restated his position that these two methods of production will not continue to co-exist. He neglected to acknowledge that also in 2021, Multilingual Magazine published a rebuttal in which Christopher Kurz and I argue, among other things, that these two methods of production can indeed co-exist and will. Obviously, one view of the future will turn out to be right and the other wrong. You can download and read the article by Mr. van der Meer and the rebuttal (https://www.ttt.org/translation-economics-and-rebuttal/) and decide for yourself which position is more convincing. Or you can simply wait ten years and observe what happens. 😃

FIT does not have the luxury of waiting it out passively. We need to state our position and get it out to the same people who attended LocWorld Malmö. Many of them are wondering about the future of human translators. I know because I was there and spoke with them.

The presentations at LocWorld Malmö were not all bleak from the perspective of a professional translator. 

A very different vision of the future of professional human translators was given in an Unconference session later that day by Scott Schwalbach of Amazon. Scott works in the translation department as a manager and has a much more optimistic view of the future of the profession.  He emphasized the importance of treating translators like people and helping them better use their creative skills and receive appropriate compensation. I discussed with Scott the possibility of him making a statement at the beginning of the FIT North America NextGen conference in October: https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/fit-na-next-gen-conference/.

To better think of Scott as a person, like he thinks of us as people, please see his photo with me from June 8th.

By the way, the same week as the FIT-NA NextGen conference in Monterey, California, TAUS (led by Mr. van der Meer) will hold a conference in Salt Lake City: https://www.taus.net/events/conferences/annual-conference-2023.

The premise of the FIT-NA NextGen conference is that there will be professional translators in ten years and that we need to attract young people to the profession and educate them well. Although not obvious from the TAUS conference website, what do you think the premise behind Mr. van der Meer’s conference will be?

By the way, Jaap and I have known each other for many years. Our views seem to have become increasingly divergent. It is probably time for us to sit down face to face and talk about use cases and risk analysis, especially since he made a puzzling statement at the end of the panel discussion: “AI is stupid”.

In order to encourage people to choose to attend the FIT-NA event the first week of October, I spoke with Ulrich Henes, founder of the LocWorld conference series, yesterday in Malmö. See his photo: https://locworld.com/about-us/your-locworld-team/.

Interestingly, there will be a LocWorld conference in San Jose the week following the FIT-NA NextGen conference.

The idea I discussed with Ulrich yesterday is the possibility that LocWorld will mention the FIT-NA NextGen conference in one of their broadcast email messages about the San Jose LocWorld event. People would be alerted to the possibility of arriving early for the LocWorld event so they can attend part or all of the FIT-NA event (October 5-7). On Sunday, October 8th, they can visit the beautiful Monterey Bay area and socialize with NextGen attendees who stay over the weekend. Then, on Monday, October 9th, they can make their way from Monterey to San Jose. 

We can even tell them, “Yes, we know the way to San Jose”, which should speak to those who have heard the 1968 song “Do you know the way to San Jose?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqWt49o7R-k).  Who says making ourselves visible to the rest of the language services sector, especially localization companies, can’t be fun?

There is much more I could report concerning the LocWorld Malmö event, but I hope that the above will give the reader a feeling for the discussions (and polarization) that are going on in the sector.

We in FIT believe that the future for professional human translators is bright. How can we get our message out to rest of the language services sector and to the general public, so they hear both sides of the story?

Submitted by Alan Melby, Chair of the FIT North America regional center and Co-chair of the FIT Technology committee