Ohio Honyaku Group 2025 Summer Meeting Report

[John Stroman]

The Ohio Honyaku Group held its 2025 summer meeting on June 14 at the Whetstone branch of Columbus Metropolitan Library. Some regular members were unable to attend due to prior commitments. We welcomed one new member, so we began with self-introductions. We were interested to learn that four of the veteran members had been involved in patent translation for an extended period of time during their careers.

In our free discussion, we talked about how many of us entered the translation field, the need for business insurance (generally unnecessary in most cases), and how AI has been driving the creation of “garbage” content on the Internet. One translator also noted a decline in the quality of written Japanese, perhaps due to the greater prevalence of non-native speakers of Japanese today. We also touched on how small communities often develop their own lingo, forming local dialects, with a translator suggesting that you could even make a case for the existence of a “Honda dialect.”

We then held a guided discussion on a recently published article by Slator AG. Slator is the leading source of research and market intelligence for translation, localization, interpreting, and language AI. https://slator.com/.

The first item was that many large corporations such as RWS and TransPerfect have rebranded from "Language Service Provider" and "Translation Management Systems" to "Language Solutions Integrator" and "Language Technology Platform" (Slator podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXvjRTAWja4). These corporations provide "managed language outcomes"—A combination of technology (AI/MT, often specialized for each customer) and human expertise (EITL "expert-in-the-loop") to edit and revise AI/MT output for the buyer. In addition, they are starting to incorporate the recent expansion of AI into text-to-speech and almost simultaneous speech-to-speech (interpretation).

The Slator article also included survey data on whether linguists recommend translation as a career despite AI. Among the surveyed linguists, a large majority were freelancers, representing 84% of respondents. The survey found that 38% say they would recommend a career in their current role, whereas 43% would not, and 18% are unsure. Of these respondents, 84% were freelancers. Among in-house linguists, 50% said they would recommend their current role, but 48% of those with 15 or more years of experience said they would not recommend their current role.

We scheduled our Fall meeting for September 13 (second Saturday) at the same location. One member plans to make a presentation based on his research on letters from inhabitants of Japanese WWII incarceration camps that was presented at the 2025 IJET conference in May.

John Stroman (cross-posted to JAT Forums)

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