On International Translators Day on 30th September, I had a very brief cameo role on a video. I joined colleagues from the European Central Bank’s DG Translation, central banks, and supervisory authorities for a special purpose. The video was used to launch the Languages at the European Central Bank LinkedIn page.
September has quite a tools focus for me: many translation events have a focus on the use of tools. Given the relevance of tools in assisting human translators, the subject is frequently on the agenda.
At the start of September I presented at the XXIII FIT World Congress in Geneva – on the need for professional translators to remain “Experts in the Lead” in the human-machine translation era.
I also joined a panel at the European Language Data Space country workshop for Austria here in Vienna to weigh up the pros and cons. My view related to the use of language data in public administration.
In late September I attended the European Trados User Group conference: ETUG 2025. The event takes place every other year and is intended for power users of RWS Trados products. The write-up of the conference is available on the ETUG website here.
I presented a summary of Trados use cases presented at ETUG 2025 to the ECCO Working Group on Translation & Production. Their meeting focused on translation technology. I have been the FMA member of ECCO WG T&P since 2014 and attend remotely.
in September 2023, LinkedIn alerted me to the existence of its collaborative articles, written using AI. I took a look at them and contributed to some to understand the outcomes of doing so. Rapidly, I have noticed a growing number of dissenting voices about them.
“Contributing” has evolved in a commentary about how LinkedIn uses AI to tackle a question. Each question/article is split into around five to seven main points, with the possibility to add to each section. I have generally posted in the areas of translation, technical translation and linguistics (in relation to the discipline of translation). My “interventions” of typically between 250-750 characters garner between five and thirty reactions on average.
As the quantity of reactions per intervention increases, the number of followers and contact requests has also increased. And with it, LinkedIn recognised me as a “Top Voice” in certain areas. This status is no more than a small graphical badge on my profile. Aside from an initial burst of attention, the badge does not really made any big difference. If you have badges in multiple categories, as I quickly managed to do, you choose which one you want to display on your profile.
However, the badge had a very negative side-effect too. “Compliance” by contributing to Collaborative Articles is poorly received by the kind of followers I want and actively engage with. We talk about subjects like Trados shortcuts or the state of the profession vs the industry. Their contributions are thought-provoking and enhance my knowledge. While my follower has increased, the ones from Collaborative Articles are “fickle followers”. There is far less traction and less genuine engagement. In contrast, those contacts I nurture from events, networks, and groups also interact and produce stimulating content.
Are these the kind of followers I want?
A steady flow of 20 to 30 reactions sufficed for me to attract a large number of followers, albeit maybe not necessarily those followers that I in turn wish to follow back. It has triggered an inundation of contact requests and followers. Of these requests, many have nothing in common other than being a translator – and no common specialisms or language pairs! Frequently there is no real explanation of why they wish to connect.
In one case, one follower called my office and was put through to me and gave me a sales pitch. And then made a request to connect, and followed up by DMs. His polished sales patter did not interest me in the slightest, and I have no intention of connecting. In this regard I am comparatively lucky: my profile picture shows that I am clearly a middle-aged male, so I dodge the unsolicited personal mails that others have to contend with.
Authenticity and freshness of content are a LinkedIn mantra. So naturally when Collaborative Articles fail to deliver either, it becomes clear that there is little genuine intention for their content to enrich. Even their titles are prosaic, clumsy and repetitive. After reading only a few articles it became clear how they were generic prompt-based sludge. The prompts invariably spat out similar responses to a vast number of questions, particular questions/titles that only differed by 1-2 words. (It made me wonder if they use the RANDBETWEEN function in Excel to spit out new titles).
Some collaborative articles are clearly untouched by post-editing, and I suspect are clicked through by disinterested gophers on work experience, who genuinely have no idea about the subject matter or field. And many sections seem to have a stance of mantra-like repetition of some false universal truth. The aspect of “universal truth” is something that also prevails in industry-side conferences, where some speakers project the industry view onto professionals in a way that it is the only way to survive. #2023TEF seemed to go down this path to a certain extent, although it was good to see some professionals pushing back against the industry’s universal truth.
Know your field
As an in-house translator, I hold certain clear views on the use of GenerativeAI in translation, particularly the advantages and disadvantages that it poses for the industry and the profession. There are many divergent stances, depending on the area of translation you work in. I am still firmly in “Camp Profession”, and my stance is in line with professionals who are predominantly self-employed.
Collaborative articles sit firmly in “Camp Industry”. The first wave of LinkedIn collaborative articles on translation seemed to read like “MT is gospel and the only way to work.” This is certainly not the case in the profession. Initially, the near standard use of CAT tools in both profession and industry scarcely got a look in. A few months in and there has clearly been a retraining based on received contributions. “Translation Memory” and “CAT tools” do figure more strongly. The AI still trips up in terms of far too many sections of the collaborative articles that deal with what a CAT tool is. While this suggests an overcoming of the initial bias in the training of the model, it confirms that those submitted contributions are duly being used to train LinkedIn’s AI.
Sometimes collaborative article titles nevertheless remain downright incongruous. They choose to address subjects like “bilingual communication in global enterprises.” This must be due to the AI understanding translation as an exercise of a single source language to a single target language. But “global enterprises” communicate in many languages, although possibly only bilingually in an individual target market. Mere bilingual communication throughout a multinational cooperation is as feasible as a multinational corporation with one desktop PC and a filing cabinet. (Note: this was a humorous dig at the Robinson Corporation from Neighbours).
LinkedIn still appears not to know my field
LinkedIn still spews out subjects I ought to comment on – many of which are very wide of my expertise. I reject any notification to contribute to a subject outside my field, probably about as far “off remit” that I’ll go is to contribute about content strategies, due to having half a clue about them.
To understand the worthlessness of “Top Voices” I acquired one on a subject I was not qualified to talk about. That achieved, I stopped commenting on that subject area. After several months they did eventually remove my “Top Voice”. This demonstrates that uptake is poor among professionals while the decay period for losing this status is a long one.
Contributing to Collaborative Articles: kryptonite?
By contributing you provide human generated text data to pass into the LLM, to train the AI that LinkedIn uses. By contributing, you are siding with industry to the detriment of professionals. If you are a language professional, you may be contributing to drowning out your own voice on the platform.
Some professionals have therefore actively chosen to not participate – a very respectable decision. Others have submitted content that either itself is AI-generated, to therefore try to hasten the “rot” of the model. Putting it another way – they try to feed the snake its own tail. My reservation to this approach is that LinkedIn is a platform to promote skills, so such efforts might be futile. No anonymity in posting of contributions might feed negatively into the algorithm and come back to haunt you.
Collaborative Articles: Marmite?
Another comparison would be to compare them to Marmite. But what is to love and hate about them? What I have actually loved is that their pure mediocrity has also helped me identify potential areas to blog about. However, LinkedIn might scrape my blogposts if I share them on LinkedIn to feed its AI and in turn its collaborative articles. I need a better understanding about how LinkedIn obeys a customised robots.txt file or scrapes my website. The “disruptor” in me loves the creative ways other contributors have to shovel in nonsensical AI-generated content into the Collaborative Articles. Hopefully with an eventual effect of “breaking” it.
I rapidly have come to hate the mantra-like repetition of the questions. This has led to my answers becoming a repetitive stream of consciousness. I do not wish to invest my time in writing “snippets” of 250-750 characters as their have a limited impact. One contributor I seem to spot regularly uses it to promote their CAT-related solution. Sadly, the system is also too dense to pick up the fact that it is thinly veiled advertising, and it is not really possible to report such contributions as self-advertising. Then again, why users also have to police the site’s output when it makes money from publishing such dross.
I understand that fast-moving technical advances blur boundaries. But I despair that LinkedIn fails to grasp the difference between translation and interpreting. Sadly, some non-lay human audiences also seem to struggle in this regard.
Or then there are questions that show that professionals should be in thrall to the industry, a practice I call out wherever possible.
“How can you use translation memory to optimize pricing for your clients?” This title advocates that translators should punish themselves for the effective use of assistive technology. CAT tools and discounts for fuzzy matches are already being used to exploit translators and drive costs down, effectively penalising their investment in CAT tools. This is part of the industry vs profession schism that agencies exploit. I’d urge translators to work directly with customers, and to forge close working relationships, but to take a balance approached in terms of offering discounts – give them something, but do not reduce yourself to slavery rates.
Another recent case referred to CAT environments allowing translators to translate more in more languages.
The article states: “Lastly, scalability is increased by allowing translators to handle larger volumes of content and more languages.” This is a clumsily worded statement. Using a translation memory in its own right will not allow translators to handle more languages. It is no substitute for their mastery of a language. And nor does its use unlock new languages. It would be far more accurate to say that TMs can allow LSPs to centrally store language data in a large number of languages and under certain circumstances to leverage this language data to assist translations in new source/target language combinations.
Recently, I started calling out Collaborative Articles that fall into the plain embarrassing category. However, I have tried to take an approach that does not give any information away other than what is wrong. Correcting it could lead to my input might being used to retrain the LLM used. I rate a lot of Collaborative Articles as being poor. Sadly, the feedback categories offered don’t fit the issue to address: AI output is published with minimal human intervention.
Will nobody rid me of this troublesome grift?
Many users on the platform despair at LinkedIn collaborative articles and requests to contribute filling their feeds. It is possible to stop notifications from LinkedIn Collaborative Articles from appearing among your notifications. However, it is not possible to choose to actively have them removed from your feed of other people’s contributions to them. There is a way to block all content from a certain person, but not a certain type of their content by someone.
In this regard, there are other possibilities that I would like to see implemented on LinkedIn. I would also like to block carousels over a dozen slides – it’s another case in hand of “death by PowerPoint” – with inflated decks of slides.
I would also like to choose what kind of posts I see from companies I follow. For example, I follow a lot of internationally active banks, and follow them to see what their news is. A lot of 3rd+ degree connections post about their new job at an institution on another side of the planet. And then, because they tag their new employer, I also see their new employer’s “Welcome on board!” comment to them, which LinkedIn assumes might interest me.
One downside to being the only linguist in your setting and with the knock-on of limited exposure to your target language is a lack of opportunities to discuss intricacies of usage. This issue can of course lead to an inadvertent usage, or use of a non-inclusive term. The scenario was this: I was engaging on a post on LinkedIn about why it is good for translators to be able to talk to one another in projects where multiple translators work on the project.
The isolation as a translator means that you can often become blinkered in your vision (and thinking!). As wonderful as stable customers are – and they are increasingly rare in the cut-throat “first-finger-first” world of getting translation work. Established translators have interesting ideas: translation slams, retreats, networking events and the like. All aimed at talking. Collaboration can be a very rewarding experience – this is why I appreciate the opportunity of reviewing EBA Guidelines – I get to ask questions, look at the translation through a different prism or lens.
Regarding collaboration and communication in the post in question, my well-intentioned comment was:
[…] collaboration thrives on direct communication between translators – sometimes agencies throw up unnecessary Chinese walls between translators working on the same project (I remember once working on a large project where we were all only allowed to “chat” through a moderated anonymous portal – such was the fear of the agency that we might build a team that would compete against the agency we were working for!) In another crazy situation years ago, where a large project was carved up between two agencies, I discovered that I was providing terminology support for the same project I was translating part of for the other agency.
Bang. And then it was. A careless choice of words, although one I knew from a professional context.
Even Homer Nods…
The poster responded by pointing out that “Chinese walls” was an outdated and offensive term for some. I chose to own my mistake, accepted their insight and replied that I would refrain from using it in the future. A hollow promise? No. I immediately acted on it. How did I act?
I immediately accepted the mistake – and said that I would refrain for using it in the future. With reflection, and hindsight too, I realise that the analogy is also incorrect/lazy – both in terms of my usage and in a financial context. The Great Wall of China (and walled cities throughout history) served for protecting territory, but not to prevent citizens from leaving. Suitably chastened, the next goal was to find a more accurate term for the required context.
I asked the original poster whether they can suggest “a suitable, succinct and more inclusive replacement for its use in the sense of “a barrier to avoid potential conflicts of interest” e.g. between advisory and trading divisions (as used in investment banking)?” The OP promptly offered terms like “firewall” and “screen”. My own research also yielded “ethics walls” and “ethical walls” – as mentioned by Judge Low in Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. v. Superior Court (1988). Low’s suggestion also works particularly well for preserving the concept of “hiring over the wall”. This is an internal staffing move of hiring someone from the other side of the ethics wall.
I amended the terminology entry for Chinese wall(s) in my MultiTerm termbases. It now appears as non-inclusive (an additional field at term level used in conjunction with a QA tool for inclusive language). This means that in the event of any German term translated as “Chinese wall(s)”, I receive a warning that the term is to be avoided, to allow me to then correct it as I go. This is particularly useful in terms of fuzzy matches. In addition I have a MultiTerm export routine that allows an export of non-inclusive terms. Its purpose is to increase awareness by circulating this list regularly, to help non-L1-colleagues.
Checking existing usage in publications. For the website, I ran a google search for site:fma.gv.at “Chinese wall”. Hits appeared mainly in downloads from external sources, or from historic documents – on both the German and English versions of the site. These I can’t change, because they are the words of other stakeholders. When we used SiteImprove, I used reports (e.g. about the use of Chinese *AND* wall). Using reports in SiteImprove frequently identified obsolete terminology for correcting it. I contended with a lot of “inherited” translations from numerous translation sources, prior to becoming our English web editor. I discussed any mentions found in the German version with post/page authors.
Checking existing usage in translation memories. I check both the source and target texts of segments for usage of “Chinese wall(s)” and how it was translated. For example, the English source spoke of “Chinese walls” but the German target spoke of “Informationssperren (sog. “Chinese walls”)” In some cases, I remove the translation unit from the Translation Memory. In other cases I add a quality penalty (I use a numerical quality field from aligned texts that I used to build up my initial translation memories, based on their quality (e.g. 95-100 for aligned texts of legal acts from Eur-Lex (with penalties for age), 85-90 for aligned texts of publications where the emphasis of the translation was not such a strict word-for-word rendering, (with penalties for age)). I delete translation units “past their sell by date”. (I’ll deal with TM housekeeping in a future post).
However, I didn’t beat myself up over it. Instead, I used it as a way to test my processes and workflows, which work well. I also used it as a way to think of several initiatives for informal networking events to could draw positively from the experience. And I took it on board as a shortcoming of living outside of my L1-target language culture. All of which show the importance of collaboration and talking.
It’s Good to Talk…
Reverting to the original post that I commented on, I remarked about my first physical meeting of my Working Group in Athens after the pandemic that “It’s good to talk!” In this regard as a lone in-house existence is similar to that of many freelancers in that it is a relatively isolated one. However, only if I choose it to be. This is why I try to exploit opportunities to talk to my colleagues in my department about their policy areas. This is how I remain alert to new policy information, legal acts, soft law instruments, issues encountered in operative supervision. These are important for my improved understanding of operative banking supervision.
Some pearls of wisdom yield new aligned texts (e.g. new guidance on aspects of banking supervision). Part of my non-translation remit is also keeping a watchful eye over our banking supervision processes. This is a quality assurance and quality management process, and provides useful insights for translation purposes about legal developments. Translators talking and collaborating helps them to discover new opportunities, gather different perspectives and bounce different approaches off one another.
When I outsource a piece to someone, I believe they should receive as much information as necessary. I believe in being approachable where they have questions and to discuss terminology issues. Otherwise I ensure that they can directly access the author of the piece to translate. After all the author knows best what they mean to say. In my response about translators being able to communicate, even someone pointing out my error confirms the value of communication.
The final word…
Dialogue is a two-way street – the more you give/contribute, the more your receive. In addition, this episode resulted in connecting with the OP, whose content I have read for a number of months, coming up with a creative idea for the future, and a blog post.
