Anyone else worries that by contributing to open source software these days one is also digging his/her own grave?

You've moved to different country with a language that is vastly different from yours. Let's say you're an American moving into the Czech Republic. You need to sign an important document that has legal and business ramifications. Would you trust an AI translation on the document or ask for a professional to be in the loop?

Commercial translator services lately are the worst they have ever been. You cant validate that they aren't directly sending your excel with the translation lines into a LLM with no tweaking/checking.

For a indie videogame i work on, we tried a couple translation agencies, and they gave terrible output. At the end, we built our own LLM based agentic translation, with lots of customization for our specific project like building a prompt based on where the menu/string is at, shared glossary, and other features. Testing this against the agencies, it was better because we could customize it for the needs of our specific game.

Even then, at the end of the day, we went with freelancers for some of the languages as we couldn't really validate the AI output on those languages.The freelancers took a month to do the translation vs the 2-3 days we ourselves took for the languages we knew and we could monitor the AI output. But they did a nice job, much better than the agencies.

I feel that what AI really completely kills is those translation services. Its not hard at all to build or customize your own AI system, so if the agency is going to charge you considerable money for AI output, just do it yourself and get a better result. Meanwhile those freelancers are still in demand as they can actually check the project and understand it for a nice translation, unlike the mechanical agencies where you send them the excel and they send it to who knows what or an AI without you being able to check.

I will likely be opensourcing this customizable AI translation system for my project soon.

> While using AI tools for everyday tasks like finding directions is “low-risk,” human translators will likely need to be involved for the foreseeable future in diplomatic, legal, financial and medical contexts where the risks are “humungous,” according to Benzo

Now it's a classic, you need an expert in order to check the work of the machine, because the "customer" is by definition not able to do it.

Aside from highly technical domain, in purely literary works, I think that the translator is a co-author - maybe IP laws acknowledges that already? I remember the translation of E.A. Poe by C. Baudelaire for instance; I think you could feel Baudelaire's style because it is a lot "warmer" than Poe's. I've also read a translation of a Japanese novel and I was quite disappointed with it. I don't know Japanese but I have read/watched quite a few mangas/animes, so I could sense the speech patterns behind the translations and sometimes thought they could have made better choices.

In any case, one will still need a translator who is good at "prompt engineering" to get a quality translation. I don't know. Maybe translators can add this skill to their CV, so they can propose quick-and-dirty/cheap translations, or no-AI high quality translations.

Some suggest "no-AI" labels on cultural products already - I think if it becomes a reality it will probably act as "quality signaling", because it is becoming more difficult every year to tell the difference between AI and human productions. It won't matter if what you read was written by an AI or a human (if it quacks and looks like a duck...), but what the customer will probably want is to avoid poorly-prompted machine translation.