In the second episode of the In Other Words Podcast, I speak with Dr. Juerong Qiu, an early career academic and professor at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Qiu specialises in research on translation technologies and audience reception, focusing on audiovisual translation. Her most recent study looks at how machine translation subtitling errors are perceived by viewers.
Transcript
(intro music) [The In Other Words Podcast theme fades in, a relaxed, lo-fi beat evoking curiosity, urban streetscapes and digital discovery.]
Host: Welcome to the In Other Words Podcast. A Place where we talk to translators and academics about key developments in the world of translation. For translators and all those who believe that translation still matters. I’m your host, Nicholas Jolly, a Masters student in translating and interpreting at The University of Melbourne.
Today, I sat down with Dr. Juerong Qiu, an early career translation researcher and lecturer at the University of Melbourne, to get her thoughts on the current situation for translators.
I started by asking her about how the increasing adoption of translation technologies has changed the industry.
Jurong: On the positive side, one of the biggest implications is that machine translation tools like Google Translate and DeepL are freely available to everyone. This means that people no longer have to rely on someone else to understand content in languages they don't speak. In a way, it democratises language access because it makes communication across languages so much more accessible for everyone. You can get the gist of a foreign language text in seconds. So it's an empowering tool for people who may not have had access to translations before.
Host: But accessible machine translation has led to a devaluation of what human translators do, and an overestimation of what the current technology is capable of.
Juerong: For translators, it's a more complicated picture. And many don't see this as a positive trend. I do agree. You'll see that clients may start to compare professional translators' work with machine translation, expecting translators to match or even justify why their work is better than a free machine translation. This can put unfair pressure on translators, especially since machine translation might be good enough for casual reading, but can lack the nuance and accuracy needed in the professional contexts.
Host: For translators such as myself, this has led to an increased sense of precarity in the job market.
Juerong: As machine translation tools have become more advanced, more clients now expect translators to use these tools to help speed up their work. This has led to a shift from traditional translation, where translators would work from scratch to a model called machine translation post-editing, or MTPE. In MTPE, the translator isn't starting with a blank page. Instead, they take the machine's output and correct it, right? Now, while it might sound like a time saver, it's not always that simple. Machine translations, especially for complex or nuanced text, often need extensive editing to fix awkward phrasing, correct mistranslations, or fill in missing cultural contexts. However, clients may assume that because the machine has done most of the work, they don't need to pay as much for the final product. But in reality, cleaning up the machine translation output can sometimes take as long as or even longer than translating from scratch. As a result, many translators are finding that their pay per word or per project has dropped significantly. This increases the risk of exploitation, where translators are asked to do the same level of work but for much less pay. And because the use of machine translation have been so common, the shift is becoming harder to avoid, especially for freelancers who don't have much bargaining power with larger clients. But as an educator, I don't know what the solution is at the moment. So I think this is a very daunting situation we are facing, both as practicing translators or subtitlers and also as educators.
Host: Thank you for listening to the In Other Words podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or subscribe to our substack at inotherwords.substack.com.
In Other Words is written and produced on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded, and pay our respects to elders past, present and future.
Interview guest Dr. Juerong Qiu — recorded with permission. Interview by Nicholas Jolly. Intro/outro music: Good Night - Lofi Cozy Chill Music by FASSounds. Used with Pixabay Content License. Podcast thumbnail by Nicholas Jolly. Created with Canva Free.
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