We've seen significant strudes in AI technology in recent times, and I'm interested in seeing how its place in the translation world develops. While AI obviously won't be able to spot the more subtle aspects of something like literature translation, I agree it has value in reducing the amount of time spent on the more mundane sections.
I consider myself apprehensive towards AI in general, but I'm not especially pessimistic in terms of how it will affect the industry. While corporations will certainly prefer automation for its price, human translation staff will remain indispensable not just to catch errors, but to translate things that AI can't handle. In the end, corporations do have to bend to demand, and I think the perception of MTL being objectively inferior to a human translation will remain, even if it somehow becomes indistinguishable. MTL is viewed as compromising on quality, so I think demand will remain for professional translators.
Upon examining a machine translation of my project, I'm even less optimistic about it. It falls into the pitfalls of Japanese-English translation even harder than humans, since Japanese requires a lot of context awareness. It usually can't figure out what the subject is, and it can't really make long sentences with lots of modifiers sound good in English. I can certainly see it working better for translating between romance languages, though.
Original text:
男が喚き散らす。
そのたびに、男に繋がった縄が左右に引っ張られる。
元気なものだ。
DeepL translation:
The man rants and raves.
Each time this happens, the rope connected to the man is pulled from side to side.
It's a cheerful thing.
My translation:
The man screams wildly.
With each yell, he strains against the ropes binding him.
He's a lively one.
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