Did you hear the news?
They are pulling the plug on the memoQ desktop version.
Not now.
But they’ve declared their intention to gut the software little by little and migrate its functions to the cloud.
Do you think this is a good thing for translators? Absolutely not!
This is a continuation of the same process we’ve been dealing with for a generation in our industry: centralizing resources, automating processes, tightening control, and commoditizing language translation.
Some people haven’t liked my Localization Illuminati references in recent messaging.
They thought my Four Big Lies video was sensationalistic….
You still think so?
If we ever needed a new narrative in our community, we need it now!
That new narrative is what I’m trying to write…
But it’s not going to get written by avoiding a fight.
And fortunately, Generative AI gives us a fighting chance.
That’s because Generative AI is a democratizing technology. We have direct access to it, at affordable prices.
And as translators, we are the only ones who can use cutting-edge workflows to properly control it in our language pairs.
Yes, I know….
Generative AI hallucinates and mistranslates. It can’t count. And it often sounds like a machine. It even suffers from social biases and stereotypes. It uses huge amounts of energy, and is built on other people’s data, etc. etc., etc….
And yes, of course, change is hard.
We all want to believe we can ignore the AI and keep doing what we’ve always done, based on our human skills alone.
But I don’t think that’s possible anymore.
If we just sit around making up excuses to ignore the reality and avoid change, we will get left behind.
We don’t have to let that happen though.
We can leverage the AI to run circles around the machines.
We can deliver better work at higher efficiency that will open up new markets.
Will it be smooth sailing after that?
No way…
The Industry Illuminati certainly aren’t going to help us, as this memoQ news shows.
But by being resourceful with the AI, we can do things that have never been possible before… And that the algorithms can’t touch either.
We can discover and build our own hacks and workflows.
What do you think?