I aim to identify and analyze the reasons behind the race to the bottom that is putting a lot of pressure on our beautiful industry, and brainstorm publicly about the actions we can or should take to secure a future where technology will undoubtedly play an even more prominent role, but where human experts reclaim ownership over how multilingual content is architected and delivered — and get proper recognition for it.

As a translator by education speaking four languages, with more than a decade of LSP-side experience and a track record of designing enterprise localization programs, I believe it's my responsibility to keep this conversation going and to address the elephant in the translation room.

What was planned to be a brief LinkedIn post quickly grew into a full article, and has ultimately resulted in an open letter to the language industry. The central idea: The technology isn't the problem, our way of implementing it is.

In this post, we delve into the transformative stages that have defined the last decade for LSPs.

This phenomenon is not only politically or historically interesting; it is also worth a few lines from a linguistic point of view.