Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Shape the Future, Don’t Fear It
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
How I Tamed the Big Bad AI
It takes nerves of steel not to succumb to fear as waves of artificial intelligence crash across society: first came chatbots, designed mainly to carry on conversations, and then, more recently, agentic AI, which can take control of your computer. Between translation and artificial intelligence, the challenge isn’t to avoid the wave, but to learn how to ride it. Even AI pioneers, like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, are sounding the alarm. All intellectual tasks could become replaceable within 18 to 24 months. Short-sighted employers risk plunging the economy into a chasm by replacing all their white-collar employees instead of enriching their work methods with AI. So, what can we do?
I belong to two professions squarely in the line of fire: translation and copywriting. Like a canary in a coal mine, I would be among the first to fall if the air turned toxic. Yet I haven’t lost a single client. I’ve stayed afloat by mastering the technology on my own terms instead of waiting for it to be imposed on me under unacceptable conditions.
Transforming AI into a Professional Superpower
AI is certainly a threat, but we all have a lifeline: each of us can harness this technology—even for free—to do better and more. Well-mastered AI gives us a superpower. It helps us create more value. With the help of interactive AI, we can be even more useful to our clients and employers.
So here's the approach I recommend to my colleagues. Stop being so shaky about AI. Passivity will cost you any real chance of progress. Instead, ask yourself how AI can help you deliver better services, faster, and perhaps at a better price. Consider what strategic or editorial skills you can develop now that execution no longer ties you down.
AI elevates us when we approach it this way. The writer, relieved of writer's block, can start thinking like an editor-in-chief. The translator, freed from the agony of the first draft, can collaborate with AI to shape more vivid language and more seamless prose. Her texts become more enjoyable to read and more memorable for her audience.
I was able to leverage AI to apply a set of stylistic principles that have guided me for 40 years. Previously, these principles required me to do multiple revisions, as the human brain struggles to apply 25 principles simultaneously. My texts now come out faster, and the sentence structures are more sophisticated and readable because AI, guided by my instructions, suggests multiple options I wouldn't have had the time to consider.
All my clients know I use AI. They've all received a copy of my Text Appeal style guide. I explain in detail my approach to improving texts. I don't just promise a vague human touch; I specify exactly how my involvement in the process creates added value.
Using Local AI Models in Translation and Artificial Intelligence to Protect Your Clients
My AI models operate locally 99% of the time. Therefore, I don't send my clients' texts to OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft. Everything runs on my personal computer, a $6,000 investment—hardly extravagant when you consider that an Uber Eats or DoorDash driver has to invest $40,000 to deliver pizza.
In 2023, I bought a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max chip and 32GB of RAM. It was a bit slow, so last fall I reinvested in a well-ventilated gaming PC with a 1500-watt power supply and an RTX 5090 graphics card. Keep this configuration in mind. It's the minimum for a responsive system. With this setup, I can offer a confidential service without contributing to the environmental disaster wrought by massive data centres.
How to Use LM Studio, Ollama and Free AI Models
With this setup, you can install free software such as LM Studio or Ollama to run high-performance writing and translation models locally, such as Gemma 3 12B, Gemma 3 27B, and Mistral Small 3 24B, for example. All of these AI models are free.
The free software AnythingLLM adds another essential layer: it lets you ground the AI in your own reference documents, including translation memories, glossaries, and style guides. This avoids the dreaded hallucinations, since the AI will retrieve the information instead of inventing it.
I also contributed to the development of a faithful companion called TAIGR . This Windows add-on injects references from my Logiterm bitexts and glossaries to each prompt. TAIGR applies my 25 stylistic principles outlined in Text Appeal and produces not one, but three translations: the first adheres closely to the source structure, while the following two are freer, more fluid, and more idiomatic.
AI thus becomes an interactive and perfectly discreet partner. It enriches my work and stimulates my creativity—much to the irritation of those who argue it shrinks the brain, just as priests once claimed that solitary pleasure caused blindness. By the same logic, one could argue that writing weakens memory, since it spares us the burden of memorizing everything. An absurd objection.
Submit to Endless Post-Editing or Strategic Control?
So that's my story. I'm not claiming that everyone will be saved, nor that everyone will be able to follow me down this path. The combination of translation and artificial intelligence forces us to rethink our practices. I simply want to help my colleagues envision new possibilities instead of waiting to be pushed into mind-numbing applications such as post-editing.
Those who are curious to learn more or who feel compelled to berate me as a minion of Satan can write to me at fcouture@traductionsvoila.com. You can also purchase my two Text Appeal books on Amazon. I have one in French and the other in English . The first twenty-five chapters teach stylistics to the human brain, and the last one teaches it to your AI, through instructions and examples.
François Couture is a certified translator with OTTIAQ and a certified writer with SQRP. For 40 years, he has served a stable clientele of large corporations, magazine publishers, and industry associations. His two books, Text Appeal, one in English and the other in French, teach 25 stylistic guidelines to both the human brain and AI, illustrated with several entertaining examples. They are available on Amazon.
