CRACOW, Poland, May 15 —England's Daily Mail apparently has an exclusive on the end of the Translation & Localization Industry as we know it. If the British 'tabloid' is to be believed, the end is not merely nigh, it's already here: according to an admittedly ungooglable "study from jobs search engine Adzuna" of "79 million job adverts placed in Britain in the previous two years," robots are already taking human translators' jobs on a "grand scale," and with blame/credit belonging primarily to "Google ... among those to have designed automated translation software, which is making human translators increasingly redundant."
The news also made it around the Commonwealth, being picked up this morning by the Australian, who also failed to link to or otherwise properly reference the ephemeral report. Nevertheless, it ominously quotes UK job site Adzuna co-founder Doug Monro as predicting, "Automation is already replacing jobs and could be set to replace some roles, like translators and travel agents, entirely."
As someone who has been watching Google Translate closely, I can state that its machine translation engine has made more progress this year than in the last decade. I can also state that it is now better than weaker human translators. While Google Translate still makes a lot of potentially damaging mistakes, they may no longer be obvious to the untrained eye.
From today's press monitoring:
From travel agents to translators, rising toll of jobs taken by robots.. (The Daily Mail)
Robots take jobs from travel to translator (The Australian)
Can you find the study mentioned? Will automation create more jobs than it takes in the localization industry? Do translators belong in the same category as travel agents?
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