Sarah O'Connor

speaker

261 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Sarah O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · LIVE: We Are Not Machines - with Sarah O'Connor · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

And the brilliant English translation is dogmatics.

You know, so like there's so much sort of creativity and humour involved in being a really good translator.

And so like this is a great job for people that enjoy doing that sort of thing.

But what's happened to him and to people like him is that he has not lost his job entirely.

Like it's actually quite hard to get a machine to translate things with that level of cultural knowledge and understanding.

So just to explain slightly the way a lot of translation works is a lot of translators are freelancers and there are agencies that will take work from, you know, a TV station.

studio and then parcel it out to freelance translators and what those agencies have started to do is to take something get it translated by a large language model or a different kind of machine translation service and then give it to the translator and say hey can you just check that this is right and maybe like just finesse it a

And this has become the kind of bête noire of lots of translators, because what they say is that it's, A, you know, you're expected to do this much faster, and B, you're expected to do it for much less money.

But in fact, if you care about quality, it's very difficult to actually check a translation is accurate.

And then even things like

trying to make it sound a bit better.

Like that's actually what the translators told me was it's actually quite hard to do when there's already like an answer in front of you.

And it feels much less creative and more kind of cumbersome and less enjoyable.

And so a job that was sort of creative and challenging and interesting has become...

Faster, harder, more monotonous, feels more mechanical and fundamentally kind of less satisfying.

And I think that is a real cautionary tale.

And when I was speaking to them, it made me think a lot of the Luddites, because what the translators will tell you is that the end product is less good quality.

And there are even some studies that have checked this.

So there's a big study that looked at a bunch of subtitles from TV shows before and after the introduction of machine translation post-editing.

And the quality has kind of deteriorated.

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