Yesterday, an email reached me from the university where I am going to finish my MA in Translation. They announced they were going to withdraw the MA Trans by the end of 2027 and that we were basically the last cohort to start the courses.
This is no shocking news, just another reminder how fast the professional landscape regarding linguistic services is changing. And yes, it does also reiterate what I haver heard in the last couple of weeks about the translation profession, and indeed from the very start of my journey towards an MA in Translation.
Last week I attended a roundtable that was held online by the British CIOL - the Chartered Institute of Linguists. Three panelists were questioned regarding the future of the profession. I cannot say that it helped me in any way move in a direction that I particularly like to be in.
What was also presented was an article how AI changed the landscape of other professions, most notably the legal one. I wasn't able to find the article that was shown during the roundtable, but I found a similar article that highlighted how AI would make certain tasks redundant in law services, e.g this article. The article that was referred to during the CIOL meeting highlighted how AI was more destructive as it would impact the hourly rates that law firms usually charge. It basically said, hourly fees were a thing of the past. (It also claimed that 80% of a lawyer's job could be done by AI, which poses the question if lawyers will become obsolete any time soon; my guess is they won't as they know how to lobby for their own interests.)
Regarding the future of linguists, the panelists were a bit divided here. One woman said she had to transition to an employed position as freelance work was no longer available for her as a translator. The other two panelists were partially optimistic and thought, linguists should build good relationships with existing clients, as AI cannot do that.
The takeaway for me was that the profession is changing, but nobody knows how exactly. Of course, old style university education in translation does not cover too much of AI training. It does talk about CAT tools and machine translation, LLMs are currently not taught. Now, the beauty of university training for me was that I could learn translation "the old style". This is why I am not concerned about the contents of my MA.
But I do wonder where this will lead me in the end. One panelist suggested we learn more skills than just translation, e.g. copywriting (which imho is misleading as that will also be taken over by AI, or already has been).
The bottom line is: The profession is in a crisis, embrace AI, but then nobody had a clear vision where this will lead in the future. It does look like the profession will be dead very soon, but imho not because of the changes that are occurring, but because nobody has a vision for the future.