Mx. Alba :tranarchy_punk_transgender:<p>Welp, I have officially closed down my <a href="https://blahaj.zone/tags/translation" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#translation</a><span> business.<br><br>I started in the translation business in 2008, as a side hustle just to create a bit more revenue. I specialized mostly in technical manuals, translating mostly from English, French and German to Dutch, but sometimes also from Dutch to English or French. In the heydays, my yearly translation income was in the low five figures a year working around 10 hours a week, and I seriously contemplated quitting my day job because if I just did translation full time I could probably rake in up to six figures... In hindsight, I'm so happy that I didn't do that, because...<br><br></span><b>the translation industry has been utterly devastated by <a href="https://blahaj.zone/tags/AI" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AI</a>.</b><span><br><br>In the 2010s, the greatest threat to the quality translation business came from Eastern-European and Asian bottom-feeders, churning out terrible quality translations at a dismal fee that high quality translators couldn't compete against if they wanted to. But most clients knew this, and there was ample work for translators providing high quality services at a reasonable price.<br><br>Gradually, though, machine translation started to become a thing. A slow but steady shift started. More and more jobs weren't straight translation anymore, but "MTPE": Machine Translation Post-Editing. Since it was "just" editing, not translation, these jobs were paid a lot less than translation, about a third of the rate per word in general, but MTPE would often take almost as much time as doing a translation from scratch would take, and with a poorer result, because when you're being paid dimes on a dollar, you won't be arsed to rewrite entire sentences just so they flow a little bit better - you content yourself with just correcting the most glaring errors.<br><br>Over the past decades, this shift has gradually accelerated. High quality work has totally dried up and the world at large is now inundated with piss poor AI translations because of it.<br><br>I've thrown the translation towel into the ring because I don't </span><i>need</i> the extra income to get by; it was just a little extra on the side. The few good translation jobs there still are, I'd much rather leave to people who rely on them to subsist in this capitalist hellscape.</p>