Still Life in the Echo Chamber

Inspiration springs in the unlikeliest places.

Here’s how I get going with mine: Fill a coffee mug. Open LinkedIn, scroll for thirty seconds. Cortisol spikes, signaling time for a refill. Despair at the state of the industry. Close the tab, then take far too long to resume anything resembling work. Re-open LinkedIn — because apparently I like pain — and repeat.

LinkedIn is the only social media I consume. Sometimes there’s a gem. There’s loads of garbage, too. Spend five minutes on the platform and you’d think every translator is on the verge of replacement, every dubbing studio is on life support, AI plastered across every webinar, influencers engaged in debate that the algorithm will soon bury, etc.

Some of this is true, of course. I’m just plain disconcerted that we seem stuck in a loop. Feeding our own anxieties. Chasing our tails instead of breaking the cycle. That is easier to do than getting ahead of the story and writing a different one. It’s hard work, but possible — some ARE daring to do so.

So in a moment of self-preservation, I prompted myself to step outside, into the internet wilderness, to see what the world is actually searching for.

Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself: there’s a whole world beyond the doorstep. (Spoiler: the story there doesn’t look much like the one we tell ourselves.)

Outside the bubble

This is well-anchored in the collective psyche of language professionals by now (or so I would think): our spouses barely know what we do, our moms most likely don’t, and the general public absolutely does not. No one uses the L-word and associated elaborate labels outside our bubble.

So, what do they use?

It was a quick Google Trends search, comparing some of the more vanilla terms against their AI-augmented counterparts: “translation” vs. “AI translation” or “dubbing” vs. “AI dubbing.” You might expect that, given the way we talk, the AI-prefixed terms would be surging.

They are not, and it’s not close.

"translation” vs. “AI translation”

"dubbing” vs. “AI dubbing.”

The oh-so-polarizing terms are a mere blip. The plain old terms are the baseline. Meanwhile, the user — your spouse, your mom, or the neighbor next door googling how to translate a menu — just searches for translation. They are likely just trying to get something done. The outcome is what matters.

Caveats apply, of course: general search volume drowns out professional or business-driven queries. And we don’t know the why behind each search (which is, ironically, the very argument we cling to, i.e., “Why? Because humans prefer humans, of course!”).

Ouroboros mentality

Perhaps the problem with our industry is that it is too small — and even within this smallness, we manage to silo ourselves.

Linguists hang out with linguists. Buyers hang out with buyers (they’d prefer not needing to talk to anyone on the supply chain, and just stay close to their VP bosses). LSPs want to speak/sell/Jedi mind-trick the buyers, while their relationship with linguists is reaching historically high levels of awkwardness.

Our space is oddly promiscuous. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone has worked with everyone. We cannibalize old ideas, repackage them as thought leadership, and applaud. Dare I say it? We wallow in self-justification.

Sure, we fight the good fight, but who is listening? The answer is sobering: mostly just… ourselves.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking any of the following?

• With the red tape lifted, buyers show up at conferences to signal their sophistication. Vendors show up to signal innovation. Linguists show up to mostly do not show up (unless it’s an event run for them by them).

• We close ranks around “safe” narratives: “AI is only a tool.” “The human touch will always be needed.” “Quality matters.” They’re not wrong, but they’re comfort mantras that soothe us while robbing us of agency.

• We cling to tongue-breaking nouns and arcane abbreviations no one outside our industry needs (or wants) to remember.

• Where is the new generation? The people in their twenties, fresh out of school, itching to remodel the world. Oh. They haven’t been invited.

• Worse, Exhibit A: they don’t know we exist

• Worse, Exhibit B: they see the echo chamber and walk the other way.

No wonder the circle keeps tightening: the same people, the same ideas, novel acronyms, the same anxieties, endlessly recycled. (Incidentally, this makes my work as a writer and industry commentator all the more challenging — and fun.)

So what’s up, dear language services industry?

Outside our bubble, no one is tuned in at all. Which means the echo chamber is ours to either endure… or exit.

Who is on the other side?

Data from the outside world, albeit fragmentary, shows that life hasn’t been reduced to AI for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There is so much to learn, create, write, translate, experience, and teach. Sometimes, we should allow perspective to do the heavy lifting.

Of course, the average user doesn’t think AI-first, the way global business seems to be adopting the mindset en masse (or forcing it onto us?). What users do have, though, are opinions about AI — one just needs to ask. I frequently return to (and recommend) Stanford’s AI Index Report for, among other things, an overview of how public views of AI evolve.

That’s the thing, though. You have to ask. AI doesn’t come first. Other than those with their livelihoods at stake (i.e., linguists or the countless other affected professions in our industry), no one wakes up in the morning preoccupied with AI. You’re too busy hitting the snooze button on reality or preparing your coffee to notice.

Let’s be honest. The real disruption may not be that the public discovers “AI translation,” — it’s unlikely they ever will — but that translation quietly becomes AI-powered without anyone noticing. Except we, the language professionals, do notice, talking to ourselves in our cozy echo chamber.

The average end-user teaches us a valuable lesson: it’s the outcomes that matter. Not the mechanics of how you achieve them. I’ll add a (comforting) thought to it, for a dash of extra perspective:

What matters, too, is what we learn along the way.

Now, has anyone tried the door out yet?

Disclaimer: If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Yes, this was contrarian. That’s the point. The arguments I list demand less moaning, more motion. Consider it one frustrated voice in the multiverse, trying to crack the echo chamber open.