Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work – Rest of World

As a teenager, Pelin Türkmen dreamed of becoming an interpreter, translating English into Turkish, and vice versa, in real time. She imagined jet-setting around the world with diplomats and scholars, and participating in history-making events. Her tasks one recent January morning didn’t figure in her dreams. […]

The new roles require much less skill and effort than translation, Türkmen said. For instance, she spent a year on her master’s thesis studying Samuel Beckett’s self-translation of his play Endgame from French to English. More recently, for her Ph.D. in translation studies, she studied for more than two years about the anti-feminist discourse in the Turkish translation of French author Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel, Les Désenchantées. In contrast, working on an AI prompt takes about 20 minutes.