Creative Destruction Engulfs the Translation Industry: Move Upmarket Now or Risk Becoming Obsolete

Too Long; Didn't Read

<em>This is a guest post by </em><a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/13134174901029466746" target="_blank"><em>Kevin Hendzel</em></a><em> whose previous post on </em><a href="https://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-translation-market-is-it-really.html" target="_blank"><em>The Translation Market</em></a><em> was second only to the Post-editing Compensation post, in terms of long-term popularity and wide readership on this blog. This new post is reprinted with permission and is also available on </em><a href="http://www.kevinhendzel.com/creative-destruction-engulfs-translation-industry-move-upmarket-now-risk-becoming-obsolete/" target="_blank"><em>Kevin’s blog</em></a><em> with more photos. I am always interested to hear different perspectives on issues that I look at regularly as I believe that is how learning happens.</em><br>&nbsp;<em><br></em> <em>As with many interesting posts previously published, this I mistakenly thought started from some Twitter banter, when I presumed that Kevin saw </em><a href="https://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/the-consequences-of-the-coming-machine-translation-armageddon-are-difficult-to-predict/" target="_blank"><em>this post,</em></a><em> which sees MT driving translators (and the translation industry) into an Armageddon scenario. However, it turned out that Kevin wrote his post first, and the Armageddon post may have been a response to it. Steve presents a pretty grim outlook with not much hope in sight. Some of the comments on his post build on this gloomy and forbidding outlook and are worth a gander too. I myself felt that the author (Steve Vitek) of the Armageddon post seriously needed to lighten up, and maybe do some jumping jacks and sing “Hey Jude “ (a song known to raise your spirits), but I truly do not mean to diminish his distress or mock him in any way. I too have </em><a href="https://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-driving-forces-behind-mt-technology.html" target="_blank"><em>tried in my own way to educate translators</em></a><em> about how to deal with the misuse and abusive use of MT, understand post-editing “opportunities” and translation technology in general, because most translators I have met are really nice, worldly people.</em>