Poll: Do you use an AI agent to do minor tasks in your translation (such as removing redundant spaces)? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Do you use an AI agent to do minor tasks in your translation (such as removing redundant spaces)?".
View the poll results »
| | | | Thayenga 
Germany
Local time: 22:55
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
Bored to death... again.
There are trillions of other topics, but it seems like some people have only one. Sigh.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 22:55
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
If we agree that AI can't be fully trusted - and as far as I know it can't be because of the simple fact that all AI applications have disclaimers - it also can't be fully trusted to do even these 'minor' tasks. Which means you have to check everything anyway. So why even bother?
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I naively thought I’d watched the final episode of the AI soap opera the day before yesterday, but as it turns out I was wrong…
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| Vote with your feet | 11:25 |
Thayenga wrote:
Bored to death... again.
There are trillions of other topics, but it seems like some people have only one. Sigh.
Whoever is spewing out this rancid poll vomit clearly isn't listening.
Don't vote, don't comment, leave for a week, and let's see if there's any change...
It's the same story as everywhere online - negative engagement is better than no engagement at all.
| | | | Thayenga
Germany
Local time: 22:55
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
| It's highly doubtful that it will cease | 11:49 |
Charlie Bavington wrote:
...leave for a week, and let's see if there's any change...
Make it a year or perhaps a decade. Who knows how many of these one-topic-polls they're holding in reserve?
Charlie Bavington wrote:
It's the same story as everywhere online - negative engagement is better than no engagement at all.
That depends on the topic. There is presently a lot of negative - and dangerous - engagement in my country going on. Frankly, I could really do without it, but instead prefer no engagement at all..
| | | | Peter Motte
Belgium
Local time: 22:55
Member (2009)
Dutch to Flemish
+ ...
You have to give AI agents far too much permissions to be able to be sure that nothing goes wrong.
Besides, if it are "minor" tasks, which productivity gain could they give?
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Thayenga wrote:
Charlie Bavington wrote:
It's the same story as everywhere online - negative engagement is better than no engagement at all.
That depends on the topic. There is presently a lot of negative - and dangerous - engagement in my country going on. Frankly, I could really do without it, but instead prefer no engagement at all..
I should have been clearer, I meant "better" for the person doing the posting, because engagement = reach and reach is what they want. I didn't mean better for us poor saps who have to read other people's drivel (here) or, worse, bilious invective (elsewhere).
Proz will be loving this, in a sense (he says, making them marginally happier with every keystroke )
[Edited at 2026-10-21 13:44 GMT]
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| As I said on a different poll, it's ProZ doing the hard sell yet again | 15:45 |
When MT and CAT tools were first starting up, ProZ was inundated with articles, live discussions, forums, polls etc. to get everyone believing that they were the only way forward in translation and not using them would exclude a translator from the profession.
Non-stop, all day every day, just like now with AI.
Imo, MT and CAT tools were the beginning of the end of translation as a human profession. AI is The End.
| | | | | The only truly 'redundant' thing around here ... | 16:30 |
... is AI.
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As if on purpose, this week’s 'The Economist' features an article on the subject, which, amongst other things, states the following:
«… that are concerns that personal agents could wreak havoc out of sheer stupidity. Meta has admitted that Muse will make mistakes, and has put a number of guardrails in place to minimise the potential damage when it does. Even so, some users may baulk at handing over their credit-card details until they are confident their agent will handle them ... See more As if on purpose, this week’s 'The Economist' features an article on the subject, which, amongst other things, states the following:
«… that are concerns that personal agents could wreak havoc out of sheer stupidity. Meta has admitted that Muse will make mistakes, and has put a number of guardrails in place to minimise the potential damage when it does. Even so, some users may baulk at handing over their credit-card details until they are confident their agent will handle them wisely.»
[Edited at 2026-10-21 18:15 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | neilmac
Spain
Local time: 22:55
Spanish to English
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I use it to clarify undefined abbreviations in source texts and it's quite handy.
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| I use it all the time | 20:12 |
And no, I don't do PEMT. I'm still doing real translation, have been for 20 years, and plan to keep doing so. There's lots, and I mean lots, of ways in which AI can be very useful for translators and, again, I'm not talking about PEMT. There's PDF conversion, there's glossary creation, there's term extraction, there's QA processes, there's Autohotkey automation, there's speech recognition, there's RAG (resource augmented generation) and then there's Python, which solves countless automation pain... See more And no, I don't do PEMT. I'm still doing real translation, have been for 20 years, and plan to keep doing so. There's lots, and I mean lots, of ways in which AI can be very useful for translators and, again, I'm not talking about PEMT. There's PDF conversion, there's glossary creation, there's term extraction, there's QA processes, there's Autohotkey automation, there's speech recognition, there's RAG (resource augmented generation) and then there's Python, which solves countless automation pain points. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of imagination, but with the help of AI I've vibecoded several Python scripts that I use daily in my practice and that really speed things up, especially those repetitive, tedious things we do all the time (web searches, copy-pasting, mouse-clicking, QA processes) and that drag productivity.
For the record, I'm completely against AI replacing translators. Besides, I use the thing daily and I know first hand that is far from perfect, despite all the hype. But the point is that AI is so, so much more than LLMs... many people overlook that distinction and think AI is a new thing, that was born with ChatGPT in November 2022. But it's not. It's been around for ages, and we all use it. Predictive typing is AI. Word spellchecker is AI. Google Maps is AI. Netflix suggestions are AI... AI is all over, and we all use daily, all the time. It's a tool that should be used to our advantage, and there's plenty advantages to benefit from. I guess one needs to explore it first and see what one can get out of it. Not in the "join-your-enemy" kind of way, but in the "let's-see-how-I-can-use-it" kind of way.
My two cents... ▲ Collapse
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The poll’s own example is such an atrocious use of generative AI. Every time an agent touches your text, it is liable to change any number of things arbitrarily or just plain hallucinate, which means you have to manually review everything again. An algorithmic find and replace function in your CAT tool or a good old text processor will do exactly what you tell it to do and nothing else, in a fraction of a second. You would need to have seriously drunk the kool-aid to hand such a task to AI.
| | | | Peter Motte
Belgium
Local time: 22:55
Member (2009)
Dutch to Flemish
+ ...
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