About whether LLMs have already disrupted translation and other industries.
Has this happened?
Yes 38 (30%)Not sure 54 (43%)No 34 (27%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether LLMs have already disrupted translation and other industries.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Actually I have interacted with multiple translators in multiple industries and I haven't seen any disruption (although I agree with your statement that it was never well paid)
- Synchronous translation at political/economic events still needs a personm as it ever did
- LLMs are nowhere near the level to be able to translate fine literature at a high enough quality to be publishable
- Translating software is still very hard, as the translator usually needs a ton of context/reference for commonly used terminology - we partnered with a machine translation company, and what they produced sucked balls.
I have friends who work as translators, and we make use of translation services as a company, and I haven't seen the work going away.