Human Interpreters and Translators: Rumors of Our Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
Technology vs. Human Linguists: Use- and Misuse Cases
I am both a provider and a consumer of interpreting and translation services.
In my upcoming posts, I will share my personal observations and experiences with language technology.
The big “Why?” of interpreting and translation is to enable people to communicate, share ideas, and collaborate across language and cultural barriers. As much as I love my craft, I am the first to admit that if this higher purpose can be better served by the means other than human linguists, I am all for it.
When it comes to cross-language communication, I am both a provider and a consumer of interpreting and translation services. Apart from my two working languages and a few I can understand, the vast majority of the world’s spoken and written tongues remain beyond my reach. Every day, I confront the limits of my own ‘human’ capacity. Our output is comparatively modest in volume. We get tired. We make mistakes. We cannot be everywhere at once.
At the very least, machine translation/AI tools, with all the caveats and deficiencies, help ease the bottleneck of output and availability, turning it into an unrestrained stream of information across linguistic divides.
And yet, from my daily trenches of multilingual communication, I see just as clearly the limits of these tools, the irreplaceable value of expert professionals, and the continuing necessity of keeping humans in the loop. As someone who lends her voice and her pen to others, I have a first-row seat in this human comedy (Balzak) where overreliance on technology or ignorance of multicultural communication dynamics leads to amusing misunderstandings at best and tragic outcomes at worst.
In the upcoming posts, I will share my personal observations of experiences with the use- and misuse cases. (Should we nominate ‘use-case’ as the most ubiquitous phrase of 2025?)