World languages majors in some respects seem like an anachronism in an age of globalization and machine translation. For low-end work, Google translate will do it for free, and for the high-end market, why not just hire someone with native fluency of both languages? It's hard for a four-year college degree to compete with immersion learning.

> For low-end work, Google translate will do it for free

This is a terrible take. Google Translate is really not at a level where it can provide consistent and reliable results, that convey exactly the same meaning as the original texts.

“Low-level work” is also not a thing. Either you need a professional translator, or you don’t.

> and for the high-end market, why not just hire someone with native fluency of both languages?

So you would only need to find people with native fluency in, let’s say, Japanese and German, to get official paperwork translated?

Genius. Can’t wait for a world where there is only one translator for every million people.

Having a 4 year degree in Japanese from some random US flyover state isn’t going to make you fluent enough to translate business contracts anyway. I studied 4 years at a higher-rated university and could barely get by in the language until I studied a lot more on my own

While I suspect that your point is indeed valid, I think that contracts are a special case.

Heck, I'm a native English speaker with graduate degrees, and even I can't understand many legal contracts written (ostensibly) in my native tongue.

In other words, hire a bilingual lawyer for that stuff...

> Having a 4 year degree in Japanese from some random US flyover state isn’t going to make you fluent enough to translate business contracts anyway

That's not the point.

Random native speakers of two or more languages aren't equipped to do that either.

Low-level work is absolutely a thing. For example, I have used automatic translation tools to translate documentation and comments in source code. The results aren't perfect, but they are instant and much better than nothing. The ground truth of the source code is right there as well, so potential errors aren't a significant concern. Having to send translation requests over to an actual human translator every time would have been slow, expensive, and disruptive for my workflow.

Then there is just simple stuff like ordering a product off a Chinese or Japanese site without an English translation. Increasingly they are just machine translating their product descriptions themselves, but it wouldn't be economical to have a human do that for thousands of SKUs.

> I have used automatic translation tools to translate documentation and comments in source code

No one has personally hired professional translators to do this, ever. Before automatic translation happened, there were volunteers. Only corporations had the resources to professionally translate documentation.

And if you are a corporation, you cannot rely on automatic translation for these tasks anyway.

Anyway, your examples illustrate situations where we went from no translation or crappy translation, to reasonably useful. That's just not what translators and interpreters do.