Language is in a peculiar decline these days - there’s the process of English becoming the most badly spoken and written language ever, because all of us non-natives use it online and often also at work. Together with the inescapable avalanche of slop being churned out.
Also, language used to carry authority and this is getting lost for more and more people. We have been bombarded with advertising, propaganda, lies for many generations now and it’s becoming stale. Longer texts used to carry more authority, now a topic can be communicated very precisely through a meme, and why not? For a translator I am getting awfully distrustful of words I’m afraid. I believe we are already standing right under the crumbling tower and will have to learn to communicate through shrugs and grunts. And again, why not?
Here’s the thing: human translators have been using ‘AI’ for over a decade. It used to be called machine translation, and for anything but the dumbest stuff it’s a dumb idea, first nail in the coffin of translation. Translation agencies loved the shite, of course, because they could now pay a translator 0.05€ per word instead of 0.10€, arguing that now the same work took less time (it did, and also a lower quality translation was produced with a lot of costly bullshit software in the middle). The translators, as is to expect, hated it, but were forced to accept it or starve. We are now very slowly reaching the point where we are hired back as esteemed professionals after AI-caused communication mishaps and business fuckups keep piling up …