I actually know a professional translator and while a year ago he was full of worry, he now is much more relaxed about it.
It turns out that like art, many people just want a human doing the translation. There is a strong romantic element to it, and it seems humans just have a strong natural inclination to only want other humans facilitating communication.
I’ve done freelance translating (not my day job) for 20 years. What you describe is true for certain types of specialized translations, particularly anything that is literary in nature. But that is a very small segment. The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature and for that companies don’t care whether a human or machine did it.
How do they know that a human is doing the translation? What's to stop someone from just c&ping the text into an LLM, giving it a quick proofread, then sending it back to the client and saying "I translated this"?
Sounds like easy money, maybe I should get into the translation business.
The fact that the client is actually going to use the text and they will not find it funny when they're being laughed at. Or worse, being sued because of some situation caused by a confusion. I read Asian novels and you can quickly (within a chapter) discern if the translators have done a good job (And there's so many translation notes if the author relies on cultural elements).
1) almost all clients hire a translation agency who then farms then work out to freelance translators; payment is on a per-source-word basis.
2) the agency encourages translation tools, so long as the final content is okay (proofread by the translator), because they can then pay less (based on the assumption that it should take you less time). I’ve see rates drop in half because of it.
3) the client doesn’t know who did the translation and doesn’t care - with the exception of literary pieces where the translator might be credited on the book. (Those cases typically won’t go through an agency)
It turns out that like art, many people just want a human doing the translation. There is a strong romantic element to it, and it seems humans just have a strong natural inclination to only want other humans facilitating communication.