Maybe I’m not super up to date on AI stuff, but I worked as a translator for a year, and AI (they used ChatGPT and DeepL) still made a bunch of mistakes that you’ll immediately notice when you speak the language. It feels like their training input had a bunch of older, Google-translated articles in them that were just bad. Maybe an AI trained specifically for translation with curated learning material and a “teacher” who corrects mistakes can get closer to replacing human translators, but it’d still miss the cultural context of certain words and phrases that are in a translator’s passive vocabulary, at least in less widely spread languages.
That being said, it’s definitely harder to make a career out of translating because companies who don’t know any better just use AI instead. As long as they get their point across (and make money), they don’t care about the finer details.
That’s true, and especially smaller businesses often can’t afford translation services. If a machine translation can increase their sales, I won’t blame them for using it. I’m just a language nerd who knows nothing about running a business (and I’m not even an actual translator, I just happened to speak the right language at the right time).