I took part in a lot of discussions then with other professional translators, and the reaction of many was similar to that of some of the commenters here: not only were they discouraged because their hard-earned language and translation skills no longer seemed needed, but using LLMs as assistants took the enjoyable challenge out of the translation process.
Nearly everyone I spoke with then worked from home as a freelancer, carefully crafting one translation at a time. They didn’t like the idea of becoming managers of large-scale translation projects, even if it meant they would be able to apply their higher-order intercultural communication skills.
I do only a little professional translation myself now, but I try to keep up with AI developments and I often use translation tasks to test the latest models and frameworks. Over the past few months, I have vibe-coded some multi-LLM translation systems where texts were passed through multiple models that checked, critiqued, and improved each other’s translations. For the texts I tried them on, the results were much better than any single-LLM translation, approaching the level of the very best human translation. The API calls weren’t cheap, but for high-stakes translations such a system would more than pay for itself.
When designing that “vibe translation” system, I did apply my experience as a translator, similarly to what Simon is recommending programmers do now with vibe engineering. At this stage in my life (I’m sixty-eight), I am fine with that. But if LLMs had arrived when I was, say, just five or ten years into my translation career and still proud of my nuts-and-bolts skills, I might very well have looked for another career rather than becoming a vibe translator.