What’s does job security look like for interpreters in the face of recent advances in artificial intelligence? Get the low down from Middlebury Institute of International Studies associate professor Barry Olson, a conference interpreter with 25 years of experience. Olson is also the founder of Interpret America.

In his in-depth review, Olsen breaks this moment in time into three baskets:

• Technologies for the delivery of interpreting services
• Technologies that augment an interpreter’s performance
• Technologies designed to replace human interpreters‘ purpose altogether

There are situations in which good enough is good enough — where AI more or less gets the job done. But in medical, legal and diplomatic venues, uncorrected mistakes could be catastrophic. Hold on tight as the future of interpreting reveals itself.

Here’s a dose of bad news from the Hastings Center on the failures of medical interpretation and the resulting harm to patients.

In this recent essay, Medical Interpretation in the U.S. is Inadequate and Harming Patients, a team of writers observe that there’s a shortage of in-person medical interpreters, which has led hospitals to turn to machine language tools such as Google Translate. You’re more likely to end up in the ballpark if the language in question is Spanish, but watch out if it is, for instance, Chinese. Studies that compare Spanish and Chinese interpretations found that errors are more common in Chinese and more likely to present life-threatening harm.

Throw in a lack of cultural competence training among staff interpreters, and the consequences can include delayed emergency care for children, an increase in errors and costs, and a decrease in care quality and patient satisfaction.

The Hastings Center report goes beyond the mere translation of words and digs deeper into the nuances of the medical exchange. “Expecting patients to adhere to Western constructs of health communication is unfair and unjust,” writers Riya Dahima, Melinda Luo and Vrushali Dhongade contend. “We must consider how linguistic differences and cultural values impact patients’ expectations and decision-making.”

What is a problem all too common for medical interpreters? When Kelly Henriquez asked that question at a panel on interpreter self-care at a national conference, the answer she got was, Loneliness.

Henriquez, a dual-certified Spanish medical/healthcare interpreter working in Virginia, noted these trends:

• Many interpreters don’t know where to turn for help.
• Fourteen percent reported they never got training on how to address their mental health needs.
• In-person interpreters were more likely to get an emotional boost from their work.
• Remote workers were more likely to report a decline in mental health.
• Certification such as that offered by the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters was a predictor of how many tools interpreters had to fight feelings of isolation and loneliness.

For more detail, and for self-care tips, find Henriquez’s blog post on the subject here.

Usually we’re here concerned with the utilitarian aspects of translation. How does a Hmong patient, for example, best learn more about foot care with diabetes, post-op care or child immunization schedules?

This week let’s take a step off the path and consider the artistic aspects of the translator’s job. In this New York Times piece, “Building Something Together’: Translators Discuss Their Art,” five translators describe the joys and frustrations of turning literature from other languages into English. 

Literary translators have often gone unrecognized, and the profession has never been much of a route to wealth. Yet, as the Times observes, “The act of carrying a work from one language to another — an art as much as a craft — is anything but mechanical: Translators’ choices are informed by their sensibilities, their emotional landscape, their background.”

Read the complete story here.

Get a look at a version of the future — here’s an AI-powered robot that switches with alacrity from English to German to Chinese to Japanese in a Q&A with an off-screen interviewer. A video of the conversation appears in this New York Post story, ‘World’s most advanced’ AI robot speaks several languages in creepy video.” Hard to say what’s most unsettling: the robot’s facility with language, or the visible mechanical body parts attached to a more-or-less human face. You can’t watch without wondering, If this is a fork in the road, where are we going to end up?

Good news if you happen to be an athlete, bus mechanic, or short order cook. Those professions are judged to be least affected as artificial intelligence becomes, well, more intelligent, according to a paper published in March by University of Pennsylvania and Open AI researchers, “An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models.”

What’s good for short order cooks could shape up poorly for translators and interpreters. The researchers determined whether AI apps could reduce by at least 50 percent the time required for a human to complete a work task. Translators and interpreters topped the list of AI endangered professions, with more than 75 percent of their job functions vulnerable to AI advances.

For interpreters and translators, the news isn’t all dire. The paper’s authors explain that their work won’t necessarily be fully automated and eliminated. AI-powered software, however, may be able to “save workers a significant amount of time completing a large share of their tasks.”

See a quick rundown of most affected professions on the slator.com website, here.