> was too expensive.

This is probably the real problem. Translators are payed shit nowadays for what is a really high-skill job. I have translators in the extended family who had to give up on that line of work because the pay wouldn’t sustain them anymore.

yep, exactly. the issue isn't that there will no longer be a need for human translators - machine translation makes subtle mistakes that legal/technical fields will need a human to double-check.

the issue is that many translation jobs will, and already are, being replaced with 'proofread machine translation output' jobs that simply don't pay enough. translation checking is careful, detailed work that often takes almost as much time as translating passages yourself, yet it pays a third or less of the rate because 'the machine is doing most of the work.'

I don’t think it’s really because “the machine is doing most of the work”, but because there’s no good way for clients to assess the quality of the supplemental human work, and therefore the market gets flooded with subpar translators who do the task sloppily on the cheap, in a way that still passes as acceptable.

Which is exactly what this new breed of AI does - create a facsimile that is good enough to devalue the human equivalent.

AI translation is good enough to get business done. And it is instant, which opens up completely new opportunities and markets. Getting e-mail in a foreign language, translating it, writing a response, translating that back and closing a deal. Using a human translator would take much more time, because they cannot always be on call.

An adequate AI translation is a lot better than no translation.

When you have to use any documents within another country that doesn't list their original languages as official, not much, if anything at all, is machine-translated AFAIK. Is this not the case for most legal paperwork as well? You almost always need certified translation (by a human), for which you have to pay out a reasonable sum. And if it's not a good translator, you pay double.

e.g. Italian citizenship can cost as much as a brand new car in Brazil and almost half of that cost could come from certified translation hurdles.

Funny you mention archaeology. Humans used to apply our excess productivity to building pyramids!

Jobs like archeology could probably also be automated further. Somewhat limiting this is possibly the fact that the "market size" for automation here is small.