Winter 2024 Meeting Report
The Ohio Honyaku Winter Meeting was held on December 7, 2024 at the Whetstone Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library from 11:30 to about 1:45 PM.
Five members attended the meeting: Carl K., Cliff B., Allyson S., Shinil C., and John S. Two more members had been planning to come but canceled at the last minute.
Free Discussion:
Members related their most recent experiences in translation/interpretation and discussed ways to maintain an adequate income in today’s market.
One member has ventured into day trading as an additional source of income, with mixed success so far, as he works to transition out of a dying translation market. Even so, he mentioned that he was still getting large amounts of work for financial and website-related translations. Three others have maintained a steady stream of work in very narrow fields with specific clients who require human expertise for legal reasons or sensitive corporate negotiations. The remaining member is retired from translation as a business.
It appears that translation rates are either unchanged or slowly declining due to AI. However, highly qualified interpreters can raise their rates as a cost-of-living adjustment. In addition, the exchange rate for yen or pound vs. dollar adversely affects translators living in the US, and in most cases, the customers merely dictate the rate and are unwilling to negotiate.
The consensus from the discussion was that most end customers may be satisfied with what they consider “good enough” translations, and they are unwilling to pay for human expertise when an AI generic rendering appears to meet their needs. This downturn in translation may also be attributed to a lack of customer understanding of the translation/interpretation process, and to advertising by big box agencies who claim that post-editing of AI output is equivalent human translation, but less expensive. We all acknowledged that the retail translation/interpretation market is customer driven.
On a related note, most small liberal arts colleges in the US are under financial stress right now. Enrollment in entry level Japanese courses in the US is steady, but upper-level Japanese courses attract few students, and many colleges are discontinuing the instruction of “arts” such as foreign languages as a cost-cutting measure. Many potential employers advertise for new employees with STEM degrees, and this attitude has even filtered down to the high school level. As a result, fewer students consider foreign language expertise as a viable option for successful employment after graduation.
Presentations:
John S. gave a short presentation showing a screenshot of the ChatDico website. ChatDico.com serves as an AI portal and middleman between the user and multiple AI engines, thereby enabling the user to input a source language sentence and choose one or more AI engines (GPT-4 omni, Claude v.3 Opus, Mistral Large, Google Gemini-Pro, Meta Llama v3 70B) to get an output translation. The homepage also has pulldown menus for the target language, number of output variants, output language style such as “formal,” the general field of inquiry such as “science,” and allows the user to add a bilingual glossary of up to 100 source and target pairs. Monthly subscription is about $9.50 (billed in Euros), and can be canceled at any time. He also introduced an online article reporting that 43%+ of books translated into English in the UK are written in Japanese. Therefore, the J>E translation market for literary or creative works is booming.
Cliff B. described his preparation for an upcoming presentation at the May 2025 IJET in Fukuoka. In our fall meeting, Cliff briefly explained the content of his proposed presentation for Fukuoka IJET concerning translation of a packet of handwritten letters from a Japanese survivor of a WWII internment camp in the US. For his upcoming presentation, Cliff introduced a recent book: 英国人青年の抑留日記：戦時下日本の敵国人抑留所 “Interned in Wartime–Japan Diary of Young British National” by Sydengham Yeend Duer, who was born in Japan and attended school there, but as a teenager was interned in a WWII Japanese prison camp along with his British father. The author kept a daily diary with alternating entries in Japanese and English, and the publishers of the book have presented the diary entries on opposing pages along with their translations. We look forward to an update from Cliff at the spring meeting.
Discussion of Group Focus and Membership:
Members also held a discussion on ways to expand and focus our membership. All agreed that we want the membership to consist mainly of people who normally use Japanese and English in business and their daily lives, and can communicate to a certain extent in both languages. Allyson S. has been successful in establishing her own interpretation business and is familiar with marketing in the Columbus (OH) area. She suggested sending out postcards to the interpreters/translators at the many Japanese satellite companies, mainly in the automotive industry, and perhaps putting up posters at the stores in the Japanese market complex to invite people to join us. She also plans to invite students from the interpretation course she teaches at OSU. Allyson is willing to design these invitations if some current members are willing offset her costs. Other members unanimously agreed this is a good idea.
The meeting adjourned about 1:45 PM. We successfully reserved the same room at the Whetstone Branch for March 8, 2025 from 10:30 AM to 1:30 PM (breakdown and cleanup finished by 2:00 PM).
Prepared by John S.
