Will AI lead to a large decrease in TRANSLATOR & INTERPRETER jobs before the end of 2027?
8
183
210
2028
76%
chance

Since employment statistics generally suck and in this particular case may be difficult to parse, I will resolve this question based on the following metric:

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Resolves YES if either:

1) The NYT, Washington Post, or WSJ reports in a regular article (not op-ed, not video, not podcast, etc) that there has been a large drop-off in translator/interpreter jobs due to AI. They should provide quantitative statistics as support, not just telling the story of one translator who lost their job, for instance. The drop-off needs to be substantial. I'm not going to give an exact number cut-off because it's hard to say the precise threshold this will become meaningful without having a really good understanding of how the statistics were determined, but something like 50% reduction would obviously resolve positively, and something like 3% reduction would obviously not lead to resolution. As long as the story makes clear that AI has led to this major drop-off, and it's not just a fluke of year-to-year statistics, I'm willing to resolve positively to a decently wide range, though. The article also needs to be definitive. It cannot say "this drop-off could be due to AI or the major recession". It needs to be pretty confident in its conclusion.

2) Multiple (3+) other reputable but smaller news sources report the conditions from (1) such as Vox, Chicago Tribune, Slate, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, etc.

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Cutoff is end of year 2027. If there is not good evidence by then that AI has led to job loss for translators, it will resolve NO.

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I will not bet in this market, as the resolution is subjective. I will be happy to consult with moderators / subject matter experts / etc if there is a debate or unclear resolution conditions. If you have questions, ask in comments and I will update the market description. I reserve the right to tweak the market description over the next couple days in response to bettor feedback.

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I've had this as a market for quite some time, for 2025

@benshindel what do you think about the resolution source i took? it's not something i am familiar with so i just did some google searching to find what agency reports this

@firstuserhere I think the BLS statistics are a very good objective metric, but might be limited in capturing the spirit of the question, since I'm not well versed in how they determine which jobs fit into the category and which don't. Like, it may be amalgamating diplomatic translators, book translators at publishing companies, sign language interpreters, people who work with translation software, etc? Or a couple of those categories that might be more affected by AI could be classified somewhere else? It's hard to say, so I wanted a market with a more subjective resolution criteria. I'm also not confident that labor statistics will capture this because I don't know how they're reported, whether there's a delay, etc.

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