>It's reference material of all sorts. Technical books, manuals, software localizations, etc.
Yes, I covered that under "formulaic content". As I've already said, a lot of this was already done decades ago. East Asian manuals and copies using machine translation are kind of a meme. Human translators are not losing any work from this. These are all businesses that were never going to employ a translator to begin with; it was either machine translation or nothing.
>Second, you vastly overestimate the desire that book publishers have to pay for good translations. I've seen books from reputable European publishers that were (badly) machine-translated by a contracted translator keen to dig their own grave. Yes, Harry Potter will get a good translation, but 1,000 lesser books won't.
Well, you're not citing any examples, so you you don't give me much to work with. I haven't read a translated book in ages (I don't think), but I do move in circles where translations, human- and machine-made, are freely distributed, and people kick up a fuss over machine translations that they didn't even have to pay for. I can't imagine a paying reader being any kinder upon realizing that they're traded their hard-earned money for machine-produced nonsense. You yourself admit that the translator who does this is digging their own grave. How is this not a problem that corrects itself?
Yes, I covered that under "formulaic content". As I've already said, a lot of this was already done decades ago. East Asian manuals and copies using machine translation are kind of a meme. Human translators are not losing any work from this. These are all businesses that were never going to employ a translator to begin with; it was either machine translation or nothing.
>Second, you vastly overestimate the desire that book publishers have to pay for good translations. I've seen books from reputable European publishers that were (badly) machine-translated by a contracted translator keen to dig their own grave. Yes, Harry Potter will get a good translation, but 1,000 lesser books won't.
Well, you're not citing any examples, so you you don't give me much to work with. I haven't read a translated book in ages (I don't think), but I do move in circles where translations, human- and machine-made, are freely distributed, and people kick up a fuss over machine translations that they didn't even have to pay for. I can't imagine a paying reader being any kinder upon realizing that they're traded their hard-earned money for machine-produced nonsense. You yourself admit that the translator who does this is digging their own grave. How is this not a problem that corrects itself?