I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. English translated from Chinese is famous for this.

There will never be enough expert-level human translators, and they tend to be very expensive. Machine translation has raised the floor.

> I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there.

This.

There was even a big controversy recently with one of the games on Steam where human translators just completely botched and vandalized the translation, mistranslating huge chunks of it and injecting their own personal politics which are not present in the original text (only English was affected; other languages were translated fine apparently): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/5028562...

If you'd get the AI to translate it, even without any editing, it would have done much better job. Just because something's done by a human it doesn't automatically make it good; you still need competent people at the helm, and recent machine translation advances certainly raise the floor on that.

I don’t agree that machine translation has raised the floor, because even LLM-based translation can get pretty bad when it isn’t provided with the necessary context. And the average quality level I’m encountering has dropped since machine translation became mainstream. Poor translations have become the norm, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago, despite the occasional “all your base are belong to us”.