A translators' strike took place in France

First, a little history. Since the former USSR was a totalitarian state closed off from the rest of the world, foreign language teaching there was extremely poor, both in schools and universities. Professional translators were thus something of a select caste. This was especially true for fiction, where there was a "caste of castes"—some translators had the privilege of translating classics of world literature for years at a time.

Everything changed in the early 1990s with the abolition of censorship and the emergence of private publishing houses, when a flood of "new" texts (in reality, published in the West in the 1930s-80s), primarily detective stories, flooded the market. Speed ​​became paramount, translation quality faded into the background, and translators themselves transformed from a select caste into workhorses. The current situation, now worldwide, related to the use of artificial intelligence in translation, is described by franceinfo.fr.

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Hardly anyone anywhere in France, let alone anywhere else, noticed the translators' strike yesterday, September 30th, when they were asked to put down their pens and keyboards for twenty-four hours in honor of Saint Jerome's Day, the patron saint of their profession. "As in all professions where people work from home in their pajamas with a cat on their lap, it's hard to make yourself heard," joked Charles Recource, one of the translators.

Today, in France, an experienced translator earns the union rate, the same as a young person who has barely used his first dictionary. "The difference is in the speed of translation," says Dominique Defer, French translator of Dan Brown and John Grisham. "We get paid 24 euros per page. To live comfortably, I have to translate ten pages a day."

Meanwhile, programs like DeepL and ChatGPT have made huge strides in translation. This applies to any language. In the UK, for example, a third of translators have already lost their jobs. Meanwhile, in France, a new profession has emerged: post-editor, someone who "translates" text pre-processed by artificial intelligence into competent French. "I'm regularly asked to do this," sighs Céline, a translator specializing in romance novels. "The work is tedious, poorly paid, and time-consuming. I often have to rewrite everything." Feeling disgusted and lacking self-confidence, she's considering a career change. Nevertheless, master's programs specializing in post-editing are becoming more and more common...

It's worth adding that, if we draw historical parallels, this all resembles the situation when sound first appeared in cinema, and then color. Both occurred when silent films, and thirty years later black-and-white films, reached the level of masterpieces by Charlie Chaplin and Michelangelo Antonioni. At this level, the first sound and color films, firstly, looked like hackwork, and secondly, they conveyed natural sound and color poorly. But both Chaplin and Antonioni were eventually forced to switch to sound and color. While black-and-white films are still occasionally made, silent films are practically nonexistent.

Photo: still from Chaplin's "Modern Times," from open sources.