Ottawa Translator Rejects 'Upload to ChatGPT'
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- An Ottawa freelance translator recounted a gym encounter where a woman — identified as a Director General of Human Resources in an acting Workforce Planning role — told her to 'just upload the documents to ChatGPT' to handle three same-day deadlines
- AI translation produces concrete flaws in the author's experience: invented acronyms and organization names, forgotten sentences, and terminology that gets ignored unless 'repeatedly threatened'
- ChatGPT works for narrow tasks like running final checks against 500-page client style guides and extracting specialized terminology into personal glossaries, described as 'another way of working, not a magic button'
- The translator framed fifteen years of experience and digital tools like Google Translate, DeepL, and Antidote for spell-checking as professional tools, not substitutes for human judgment
- The HR Director General who recommended ChatGPT admitted she cannot use AI at her own job because 'it's really not reliable enough' — a contradiction the author flagged without the civil servant seeming to register it
- The translator argued that professionals like writers, editors, and translators should not be paid less because AI exists, asking rhetorically whether a roofer should earn less for using a hammer
Why it matters: The irony is that the HR Director General who told the translator to use ChatGPT admitted she can't use AI at her own job because it's 'not reliable enough' — a contradiction that captures the gap between casual assumptions about AI's capabilities and its actual reliability in professional settings where nuance matters.
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