Essential or Obsolete? The Role of Human Competencies in the Tech-Driven Language Services Industry

Öz

Rapid technological developments in the language services industry including content creation and translation have always provoked fear among human agents, such as language service providers (LSPs), translators, reviewers, and academicians thinking that technology would eliminate the need for humans. This fear can be traced even back to the years typewriters were invented and used in the language services industry, or personal computers replaced typewriters in the process. The twenty-first century, especially the 2010s, witnessed the emergence and rapid development of machine translation (MT), in particular neural machine translation (NMT). Coupled with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), human content creators and translators are now face to face with a new competitor. Although the tools used in the industry have changed in line with the technological advancements, achieving quality output has always required the competence of human content creators and translators. This competence has three important pillars: language skills, expertise in the area of specialization, and technological skills. This paper discusses that technological tools such as MT and generative AI demand human intervention to create and translate quality and effective content, which is only possible by acquiring the complete set of the above skills. Focusing on creating content for user manuals, this paper examines how to ask the correct questions, that is, how to give the correct prompts to guide chatbots such as ChatGPT to achieve quality content, thus identifying the limits and benefits of AI in an area of specialization.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• human content creators and translators
• artificial intelligence
• ChatGPT
• prompts
• competencies

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