Percy Balemans 📚

Black keyboard with new white labels on various keys

Keyboard repair day. The N key even had scratches on it. Maybe I subconsciously hate the letter N?

An open letter to colleagues: we are not mops After more than two decades working in legal translation across four languages and multiple jurisdictions, I’ve watched our profession reshaped by forces that claim efficiency as a path to our expenda...

"Machine translation would handle the heavy lifting, and we’d add the expert polish. Except the machine made a mess. And we’re doing expert-level cognitive labour to clean it up for cleaning wages.

We’re not mops. We’re translators."

#translation #xl8

www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-l...

Every facet of generative AI has made my professional life worse, without question, but THIS specific aspect has been driving me NUTS.

Clients, who have made me toil for weeks over indescribably small details, are now approving & producing in-house commercial artwork that looks like a fever dream.

Alright. So... I made something, and this time it's a Starter Pack. A fine selection of GenAI critics and (mostly) detractors.
They have a point and do not disappoint. 💐
go.bsky.app/JWGVbgz

Is it a real baby or a robot baby? You never know with these tech addicts...

"Do you have proven experience in betting?"

I've seen Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen multiple times and I'm one card short of a full deck. Does that count? 🙃

Zijn er ook meer plaatsen waar niet de vertaling maar de plaatselijke naam op het bordje staat? In Maastricht heb je bijvoorbeeld "Sint Servaasbrug - Aw Brögk".

We were worried about the wrong dystopia We were all so busy worrying about Big Brother we forgot to worry about Soma

"Don’t let AI write your texts, your emails, your communication. That’s the tech industry encouraging you to stop learning how to do things yourself so you become dependent on the drug they’re selling you."

Ken Bayer, former Google engineer, current anti-AI zealot

medium.com/@kenbayer/we...

Word of the year: sloptimization.

It's what Germans call "Verschlimmbesserung".

AI Can Probably Do Some of Your Work Tasks. That Doesn't Mean It Can Do Your Job Even for vulnerable jobs like translation and research, that work is more than just the tasks AI may be able to assist with.

"The only one who can perceive the nuances of a language is a human."

#translation #xl8

www.cnet.com/tech/service...

Here's the reality this example illustrates:

It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).

Oh-kay! I've made something-- again. Feel free to recommend yourself and/or others to be added to this ☆go-to-hell-GenAI☆ list. Cheers!

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Try and find a more experienced colleague to proofread your work. Yes, this costs money and requires more planning to meet your deadlines, but you will learn so much in the process!

#translation #xl8

And read it out loud: that's how you catch mistakes or find that something sounds unnatural.

We are doomed.

People trying to convince you (and themselves) that ChatGPT is useful:
"Keep asking questions until it gets it right."

1. This only works if you already know the answer.
2. In this example the question was on spelling. Ever heard of dictionaries? They give you the right answer straightaway!

Indeed. Apart from the message they posted months ago on their forum about no longer working on the desktop version I haven't heard anything from them. I didn't renew my subscription this year and have downloaded the installation file for my current version (11) to my hard drive, just in case...

Books cannot be translated in a click! CEATL and EWC call on the global book sector, including writers, agents, publishers and readers, to stand in solidarity with human literary translators after the announcement of Amazon to launch Kindl...

🤖 Books cannot be #translated in a click: @ceatl.bsky.social
& the @europeanwriterscouncil.eu call on the global book sector, incl. writers, agents, publishers & readers, to stand in solidarity with human literary #translators after Amazon’s launch of Kindle #Translate
ceatl.eu/books-cannot...

Sinterklaasje bonne bonne bonne 🍳

I have no interest in getting a tattoo (so far), and I certainly wouldn't get one in a foreign language that I don't know. #tattoos #translation

source : www.instagram.com/jessiez888/

Last Christmas

Heel mooi pleidooi voor de Nederlandse taal, de taal die ons bindt.

Imagine asking a doctor or lawyer to explain how they do their work...

The worst one I've heard: "Do you actually read everything you translate?"

No, I just type whatever comes to mind... 🤦‍♀️

Saw a review on Goodreads of a book I just finished reading: the text was so generic it could have been about any thriller and it didn't even get the names of the characters right. Clearly AI. But who does this? Publishers or authors wanting more 5-star reviews??

Students don’t need to go to university to use generative AI. They need critical thinking and analytical skills, the ability to understand complex ideas, to make connections and informed arguments, to cultivate creative thinking and develop original ideas. And yes it is hard work. The rest is SLOP

YouTube video by No Comment TV Russia’s first AI-powered humanoid robot AIDOL collapses during its onstage debut

Tech firms: Our AI can do anything!

AI:

youtu.be/DRQLeYTTE6A?...

A very worrying thread...

But hey, what do we know about it, we're just translators...

So much for the "intelligence" of AI (we already knew that, of course).