The school closed down in the first week of school,A large number of translators who went to the United States to study woke up and found that the sky had collapsed.
Some days ago, there was a "translation industry Harvard" in the industry and was regarded as a palace-level school by countless students of translation majorsMonterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS)The sudden announcement stated that the school has stopped enrolling students andThe school will be completely stopped in June 2027,The school’s current main task is to ensure that students can graduate smoothly.
Everyone, the academic pride transformed into"Monterrey out of print alumni" and"Close disciples from famous schools", many alumni on Xiaohongshu who had never met appeared and said goodbye to the dream school with tears, making the whole thing seem more real and absurd.
However, the matter is not finished yet.
The death of a prestigious school is a foregone conclusion, and the aftershocks of bankruptcy are still shaking. At a time when artificial intelligence has fully invaded all walks of life, the Monterrey International College, which is about to close, is also regarded as">"The first world-famous school to be eliminated by AI",This leads to more realistic and cruel problems:
How long can manual translation last in the AI era? What will be the next major that will be eliminated by AI?
01 AI impact, prestigious schools storm
">""Ceil of high-translation colleges."
Now, this ceiling has fallen down with a bang.
MIIS was founded in 1955 and was formerly the Monterey Foreign Languages Institute. It is known as the "Three Top Translation Colleges in the World" together with the Advanced Translation College in Paris, France and the Interpretation College of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom">">"The three top translation colleges in the world" are called together with the Advanced Translation College in Paris, France and the Interpretation College of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. In 2005, MIIS formed an alliance with Mingde College, a century-old private university in the United States, and five years later it was officially merged into Mingde College and became its graduate school.
MIIS offers majors in international education management, international environmental policy, international trade and economic diplomacy.Let MIIS enjoy the "translation world Harvard"translation and interpretation major.
According to school publicity,Graduates of this major mainly flow to large multinational groups and international organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, etc.With his superb translation skills, he plays a key role in the global political, economic and diplomatic stage, he is said to be MIIS alumni everywhere in important international negotiations and conference venues around the world.
The industry reputation accumulated over the years has made many students with ideal translation regard MIIS as a dream school.Entering to MIIS means realizing a dream, and also symbolizes getting an entry ticket to change the world with translation ability.This is the dream of studying that MIIS sells to global translation students.
But this dream seems a bit outdated now.
MIIS was founded atThe second half of the 20th century, when the world opened up a great economic and cultural integration after World War II,In that era when there was no AI translation and machine translation was not popular, MIIS has cultivated a large number of professional translation talents with its "strict entry and strict exit" school management philosophy.Every MIIS alumnus can become an independent senior talent in the translation industry after graduation and have absolute voice in the field of vertical translation.
You can see that The rise of MIIS and its authority in the industry are derived from the continuous demand for professional translation talents of multinational enterprises and international organizations in the early process of globalization,Responsively, MIIS continues to supply talents to the industry with its rigorous school management philosophy.
However, such a delicate balance of supply and demand has actually developed to the brink of breaking.
At the same time, with the continuous decline in the number of new students enrolled in recent years,
Although the school did not respond positively,But the current dilemma of MIIS is obviously inseparable from the impact of AI.
AI has triggered a shrinking wave of liberal arts in colleges and universities. In the past decade, affected by inflation and other factors, the average tuition fees of American colleges and universities have increased by more than 10%. Under the impact of the AI wave, college students have further gathered in majors with brighter "money prospects" such as computer, medicine, and finance. Humanities and other subjects such as literature, history and philosophy have accelerated to cool down.In order to reduce operational pressure, many universities have begun to cut the scale of humanities.
With the development of machine translation and the explosion and popularization of AI translation in recent years, translation has long been regarded as a sunset industry, and related disciplines have also been included in"Professionals to be eliminated"MIIS's fragile school structure further amplifies this impact. and finally make yourself the tears of the times.
As a MIIS graduate on the Internet said, under the wave of AI, many alumni and peers, including themselves, have shifted from the AI anxiety when they first graduated to the embrace of technology. What is really regrettable about the fall of MIIS is that">"A set of precise, rigorous and efficient language training systems and industry benchmark translation standards will be eliminated with the shutdown of Monterrey."
02 AI translation disrupts the industry
A world-class translation school has fallen, but the debate over AI translation has not ended.
Some practitioners in the translation industry still insist on it,The advantage of the bankruptcy of translation institutions is still in my mind.In the long run, controlled nuclear fusion is even one step faster than the development of AI technology.
People's prejudice about AI translation,From the shortcomings and limitations of machine translation over the years.
For a long time, Machine translation means stiff, inaccurate and difficult to understand,
Compared with traditional machine translation based on fixed rules or statistical models,Google has added an RNN (i.e., recurrent neural network) attention mechanism to the encoding and decoding of neural network machine translation. can finally obtain the translation of the target language through continuous prediction and translation of input and output languages.
In 2017, the Google Research team further improved this technology,former architecture was formally proposed,Transformer architecture,To this day, the Transformer architecture is still one of the most popular models in the global NLP (natural language processing) field and is widely used in multiple language tasks.
It can be said that long before the AI translation based on LLM (large language model) broke out, machine translation based on neural networks had completed a technical transformation. The comprehensive development of AI translation has pushed neural network machine translation applications that can already meet daily applications to a new level.
Integrating machine learning, generative AI, natural language processing and neural machine translation After other technologies, AI translation capabilities have exceeded the scope of verbatim conversion. Based on the training of a huge multilingual content library, Ai Translation can learn humans' unique grammatical patterns, vocabulary selection and sentence structure. During the translation process, it will analyze the entire sentence and paragraph to master the overall meaning and tone of the original text, and ultimately achieve the result of accurate translation, natural expression and resonance with the target audience.
Last month,Google announced the addition of enhanced real-time translation based on AI model to its Translate feature,Its Gemini The AI model can further improve translation quality, multimodal translation and text-to-speech functions from users' trillions of text translation, search and visual translation word learning every month.
SeamlessM4T, a subsidiary of Meta AI,Able to interpret voice in hundreds of languages within 2 seconds,Pre-training SeamlessM4T with millions of hours of multilingual voice data has been able to recognize the general patterns of languages, thus performing better in handling languages that are less frequently used and more in line with human speaking habits and understanding.
OpenAI's former GPT 3.5 could only translate thousands of words in a single time,At GPT-4.1, it can process up to 1 million phrases, about 800,000 words.
In the years-long AI arms race, AI translation has unknowingly become an important move in the game of technology giants.Technology is always making new breakthroughs, and for translation industry practitioners, a more realistic feeling is This is the result of thisEmployment and income changes.
The work threshold is reduced, which means a decrease in income.
A industry insider said that the text translation of 50 yuan for a thousand words was already the bottom line that he could accept, and now the quotation of 30 yuan is difficult to find; in the early days of short dramas going overseas, the quotation of video subtitles was 15 yuan per minute, but now the quotation of 5 yuan per minute is 5 yuan per minute.
Some practitioners bluntly said that the former professional translation has now degenerated into a "ruthless proofreading and layout machine."
A former interpreter told the most cruel truth about the translation industry under the impact of AI:
In sharp contrast with the depression of manual translation employment, is the current prosperity of the AI translation market. Research data shows that by 2033, the global AI translation market will be US$13.5 billion, with an annual compound growth rate of 22.3%.
03 A quietly changed life
No matter what the prospects of the translation major are, AI translation has penetrated into every aspect of our lives without knowing it.
The integrated AI capabilities of smartphones make AI translation more seamless, and The popular wearable smart devices in recent years have allowed AI translation to gain more scenarios and spaces.
Meta launches new Ray-Ban in 2023 Meta smart glasses, camera and headphones are enough to make this product a good toy, but Meta announced in a subsequent update that Ray-Ban Meta will support itsLlama 3 big models, Completely changed the stereotype that smart glasses can only be used as toys.
Equipped with Llama 3 After the big model, users can not only directly activate the Meta artificial intelligence assistant with voice commands and perform corresponding voice operations, can also use the real-time translation function to translate conversations between different languages at any time.
Only wearing glasses, using the real-time voice translation function can conduct cross-language conversations, which is very close to having oneThe experience of a portable interpreter.
More importantly, based on Ray-Ban The product pricing of Meta glasses can achieve such real-time translation dialogue by only about 2,000 yuan. At this time, the accuracy of 80% or 90% is no longer the focus.
The consumer market also gave full positive feedback to this product,Selling in one year exceeds 1 million pairs,As of the first half of this year, Ray-Ban Meta glasses occupyGlobal smart glasses have a market share of 73%, with sales volume increasing by 200% year-on-year.It can be said that it has made the entire category popular with its own strength. Regarding its success, even Xiaozha himself said that it did not require fancy display functions, and AI drivers alone could make people fall in love with using smart hardware.
Xiao Zha's inspiration was learned by a group of smart headphone manufacturers earlier.
#3CC1B4;">The new AirPods Pro 3 has added real-time voice translation function,No need to purchase specialized simultaneous earphones, an AirPods can realize the functions of daily listening and interpretation. The future of seamless and seamless cross-language dialogue has slowly unfolded under the leadership of technology giants.
With the support of smart wearable devices, AI translation has become a ready-to-have function, but to achieve the popularization of AI translation for the whole nation, these are not enough. The real AI translation revolution officially began when Huaqiangbei, which has always been known as the weather vane of electronic products, also began to mass-produce cheap AI smart glasses and headphones.
Huaqiangbei speed.
At this point, the future of the translation industry is clear enough.
Maybe AI translation never needs to completely replace manual translation,The current industry changes are all the directions that a large number of former professional translations will become manual assistance for AI translation, and the cross-language reading and communication capabilities provided by AI translation can allow a large number of people in the original non-translation industry or professionals to obtain new abilities of cross-language communication and interdisciplinary and inter-professional learning.
From this perspective, the translation major is indeed no longer there.
