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Comment by muvlon | Hacker News Reader

There may well be some writing jobs that are safe for the reasons given in this post, but that doesn't help all the writers I know who have already lost their jobs and are struggling to find work.

It's not enough that humans can tell the difference and feel an ick, there also need to be enough organizations willing to pay money for that difference. From my vantage point, there are not. It turns out that for a ton of the writing produced by companies, the quality of the prose wasn't really "load-bearing" as Claude puts it. That writing is there to occupy a space and look professional at a glance, the same way elevator music is tolerable for the duration of an elevator ride.

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I have worked in the publishing industry, translation and editing (got out to a more dependable career just in time), and what is astonishing is how even "load-bearing" text is not safe from the cost-cutting pressures. That is, even some respectable publishers for the last several years will publish a book one is expected to pay good money for, with minimal editing and proofreading compared to the old days, and if it is an originally foreign book, with machine translation and minimal post-editing.

I've got some heavy reader friends and they keep complaining that many of Spains's fantasy book translations are ridiculously bad and blatantly machine translated now: Senseless terms that require looking up the original to understand, e.g. "fall" translated as in falling when it meant autumn; proper nouns, including character names, sometimes translated sometimes not; and many sentences that mix up the grammatical gender because the machine wasn't given enough context to infer it.

But these publishers don't get punished because they keep licensing popular foreign franchises, which aren't quite fungible, so consumers don't want to miss out and thus don't vote with their wallets.

How is it possible? Even if you just put text to ChatGPT it'll translate it much better than that. And with actually decent harness, the translation should be quite good. Do they even save on tokens by choosing cheapest model or something?

It's impressive how bad it is even for machine translation, I've seen examples. You're imagining them using a good LLM and a decent harness, but I'd bet it looks more like an intern copy-pasting snippets through an LLM or even just Google Translate and cleaning it a bit.

They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?

Unfortunately the answer is no. Reading or just owning a book by a certain author can be a matter of fashion or prestige. That allows for really bad work still be published.

If it's just for prestige, they should buy the original (English?) version and get even more prestige.

Proficiency in English in Spain is still rather low, and someone carrying around the original could be challenged to show they actually understand it.

Since you can't really go buy the same work translated by a different publisher, voting with your wallet means boycotting it. I agree it would be the right option to punish publishers, but people find it frustrating to miss out on both the work they were hyped for and its fandom; the latter is a really big deal for those deep into reading subcultures.

I know, but really, in the 21st century, aren't there many substitutes for whatever pop-hype we're talking about? Not enough worlds with wizards, or swords, or dragons, or whatever you like?

Sometimes the drop in sales is less than the cost savings

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