Thread by @grahamhturner

I didn’t altogether expect that my ‘end-is-nigh’ comments on the effect of technology on the future of translation & interpreting (at @ciuti2018 conference) would be popular. It’s not a scholar’s job to say what’s popular, but to consider evidence & arrive at honest conclusions.

What I see is: language technologies have got cleverer at breathtaking speed in the last decade. And cheaper: ‘Alexa’ can deal with all sorts of talk, and the manufacturers are smart enough to more-or-less give it away, undermining any public resistance, until we’re all hooked.

I see no reason to imagine that, continuing essentially in the same way, such technologies will have any difficulty in moving unperturbably between languages within a decade or three. Any distinction in quality offered by human providers will be undermined by cost & convenience.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But within a professional generation or two. Am I saying this is a good thing? Absolutely not. Does tech have anything to do with our collective
* obesity
* attention deficits
* societal breakdowns
* willingness voluntarily to surveil and be surveilled

* mental health issues
* normalisation of lying, cheating, distortion and manipulation
* democratic deficit driven by promulgation of ‘fake news’
* etc?

But the writing is on the wall.

So what’s our job? Educate effective practitioners NOW - it’s urgent. Contribute fully to development of software+future systems. Co-design policy+practice that’ll safeguard service users’ interests. Educate multilingual frontline professionals to offer direct, unmediated access.

And play our part in wider societal resistance to the human failing Tom Leonard identified in ‘The Drop-out’:

“yir clivir
damn clivir
but yi huvny a clue whut yir dayn”

poetryarchive.org/poem/drop-out