Thank you for your comment, Charles. I don’t think that machines will ever fully replace translators, or at least not in a long time. However the way we work will continue to evolve, and we can play a role in deciding how.

Fabienne, I cannot help but respond to your message. You say:

“Thanks for sharing this very interesting article, Christelle. Yes, embracing change is definitely in our interest, if we want to thrive in our job! (1) It’s so sad to see so many of us spending so much time and energy complaining about the situation in our profession, but not go any further (2). It could be so much better used to develop themselves and discover uncharted territories (3).”

1) If translators embrace the sort of change that Christelle recommends, they will no longer have a job, at least not as translators.
2) So far that they abandon their profession?
3) Clearly, they should just forget about translation.

Thank you, Zach. That’s great!

Thank you, Fabienne. Yes, self-development is key.

Thank you for your comment, Nigel.

Now change management specialists are nothing new in our society. Priests would often provide the function, while taking care to control which changes they wished to allow! Parents perform a similar function, as do our friends. What is relatively new, over the last 150 years and especially over the last 50 years, is the emergence of a group of people whose main professional function, the way they make their living, put food on their table and keep a roof over their heads, is to help others to manage change.

We have to remember that such people will always overstate the importance of change, because change is so important to them – it’s their bread-and-butter. Their claims must be examined critically, and each individual or organisation has to ask itself “do we actually need such a service?” Otherwise, at best we will have wasted money on an honest but unnecessary service, and at worst we will have been fleeced by charlatans. Christelle makes no secret of the fact that she offers commercial coaching services for translators, and I have nothing against her promoting her services, but her claims still need to be examined.

The idea that “progress actually follows an exponential trend where the speed of change increases constantly” immediate strikes me as a bit odd. Why an exponential trend? Why not a parabolic trend, or a trend that follows a power curve of 4.87? Surely such a trend cannot continue indefinitely… well of course it can’t. The idea reminds me of the harsh warnings of the Reverend Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus warned that a supposedly geometric increase in population would hit against a simple linear increase in food production, resulting in inevitable famine and starvation What he ignored is that there are other limits to population growth than death from starvation, as we see in many developed countries where the population is essentially static; and that food production does not have to have simple linear growth: we can actually get better at producing more food for the same number of people.

Change is incremental, but that does not mean that there are no limits to the increasing speed of change. Certainly there have been more technological advances in the last 100 years than in previous centuries, but this is not because of some inherent exponential rate law. There have been more works of art produced in the last 100 years than in any other century as well, but that doesn’t mean we’re about to be smothered by Grampa’s watercolors! It is because we are having to spend less and less of our limited resources on staying alive, so we can spend more of those resources on other things, such as technological development. But we can’t spend more than 100%, there are limits to what can happen. Another limit to the rate of change is the need to transfer knowledge: this will never be 100% efficient, as anyone who has ever taught a child to read will see immediately.

In our own profession, the MT lobby is saying that we all have to use MT because human translators will be redundant in the next 10 years. They’ve been saying that for 60 years now! Certainly MT is getting better, and CAT tools are getting better, but this is incremental change made possible by the fall in cost of computer power. Now I don’t know when Moore’s law is going to come to an end – not any time soon seems like a good bet – but I know there are limits to the rate of change. It is like the mortgage brokers who claim that house prices will always rise faster than wages, for ever, as if there were no limits… we saw what happened with that one!

In summary, change is not something we can opt out of, not as human beings and not as professionals and business owners. Fortunately life and evolution have equipped each one of us with a wide range of psychological and social capacities for dealing with this change. Some of us may need outside professional help at some point or other in our lives, but the majority of us won’t. We need to be wary of the doomsayers, both as individuals and as a profession, because the real challenge is identifying which changes are most important for each one of us, not decrying the fact that there is change.

Thank you for your comment, Gio.