Julian Pintat, a freelance English-to-German translator has watched his 15-year career gradually unravel. Specializing in high-stakes fields like medical technology and pharmaceutics, his expertise has been repriced as an AI cleanup service. On a recent job, translating an operating manual for an oil rig, AI mistranslated “scale”—a mineral buildup—as both a musical scale and a device for measuring weight. Fixing such basic flaws, which now constitutes 95% of his work, often takes longer than translating from scratch, he says—a frustrating reality that has halved his income and put life plans including marriage and starting a family on indefinite hold. With Google Translate and later DeepL having burst onto the scene years before ChatGPT—professional translators have been feeling the effe

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