The short answer is that the language services industry is currently split into two camps, and neither of them is focusing on the premium middle. Mega-agencies are obsessed with rigid, high-volume automation, and boutique LSPs are struggling to adapt to the tech. Even when boutique LSPs do adopt the technology, they buy off-the-shelf tools from the big guys and try to run them the exact same way.
I am able to offer my On-Call MT Department because I bridge four gaps that nobody else is touching:
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Tech-linguist divide: The industry is deeply siloed. You have software engineers building MT pipelines who have never translated a complex document, and you have veteran translators who despise automation. Designing the GAIT workflow took a career translator (me!), and executing it requires someone who fluently speaks both “systems engineer” and “strategic linguist.”
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Avoidance of complex, bespoke workflows: Large platforms rely on off-the-shelf engines to maintain their margins. They are not going to have a human establish a “gold standard” translation, manually carry translations outside the CAT tool to maintain context, and dynamically iterate the process back into the AI to align the rest of the document—especially on low word counts. That level of involvement takes a human language professional.
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Unwillingness to address the human bottleneck: Tech companies want to sell you software licenses; they don’t want to solve human resistance. Translators are facing a difficult paradigm shift right now. No software vendor or mega-agency is going to do the unbilled, behind-the-scenes work of directly coaching career linguists to adopt a post-editing mindset. They’ll just dumb down their workflows and hire someone else to fill in instead. My workflow, on the other hand, is designed specifically to encourage you to onboard your own trusted linguists, many of whom you’ve worked with for decades. This keeps human expertise in the industry, and specifically, focused on your work so together, we can deliver premium MTPE.
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File-prep blindspot: It’s not really a blindspot. Everybody knows it’s a problem; they just don’t want to be the one to solve it because it requires hard work. So standard MT providers just plug text into an engine, completely ignoring the mechanical friction—the OCR errors, broken formatting, fragmented segmentation, and “tag soup”. They then push the task of fixing all that off to the post-editing step at cut-rate prices, pretending that this won’t affect client-delivered quality.
The reason I am the only one offering this service is that I am not just selling you software access. I am managing the entire messy intersection of file preparation, dynamic AI prompting and translation, and human linguist collaboration, while seamlessly integrating with your existing systems—so you can stay focused on your core business without getting stuck in the technological weeds.
Ultimately, my hope is that this does become the standard in the premium middle of the translation industry. In fact, I am ready to teach others how to do this, too.
