https://correresmidestino.com/dont-you-just-upload-it-to-chatgpt/ Correr Es Mi Destino * The Backstory + Hi, I'm Juliette! + The Blog + The Backpack + The Canada Thing * Destinations + North America o Canada o USA o Mexico + Central America o Belize o Guatemala o Honduras o Costa Rica o Nicaragua + South America o Peru o Chile o Argentina o Uruguay o Brazil + Asia o China + Europe o France o United Kingdom * Contact + Get in Touch + Advertising & Collaboration * + [ ]Search * Menu Making a Living "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?" 3 days agoJuliette5 min read14 comments Article views: 89,820 In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back--boxing and the pompously named "body sculpt," which makes me discover muscles I didn't know I had. It's fun. I love it. But a couple of weeks ago, I ended up cancelling my second class--one of those nights when the first assignment landed in my inbox at 4 p.m., another one arrived while I was on my way to the gym, and a third one popped up right as I was standing in the locker room. All due the following morning, obviously. Welcome to the life of a freelance translator. Work takes priority over muscles. I headed for the lockers at the end of boxing class. "Are you leaving? You're always taking this class!" I turned around. I was changing into my translator clothes--jeans and a T-shirt--and she was presumably changing into her gym clothes, except first, she was busy taking off her jewelry. Her look was very polished--the kind of polished that screams office day. Over the past few months, the generous pandemic work-from-home policy had been tightened, scaled back, amended and more or less rescinded in a desperate attempt to have employees single-handedly save downtown Ottawa's many small businesses and general gloom by their mere on-site hot-desking presence. If you ask me, nothing can save downtown Ottawa or North American public transit. "I see you there every week!" Apparently, I owed her an explanation and possibly an apology. I didn't remember her, but it's a very full class and we all more or less look the same in gym clothes. "I've just received some work," I explained. "I'm a translator and I have three deadlines by tomorrow morning, so I should probably get started." "But... it won't take long. Don't you just upload the documents to ChatGPT?" I paused for a split second. Surely, she was joking. I looked up at her. She was not. "It... doesn't exactly work like that." "You should try it, it's so much quicker!" Oh. My. Fucking. God. But hey, I parent a teen. I can recognize a teachable moment when I see one. "It's not that easy, you know. Technically, ChatGPT will spit out a translated document. But first, there may be formatting issues. And most importantly, the translation will be questionable." "Why?" "Because AI isn't human, and it takes an actual person to understand what another human is trying to say--and how to say it so someone else understands it. I don't just make grammatically correct sentences in another language. I adapt, I localize, and I find the best way to convey the original message so it makes sense and feels natural. I research terminology. I make sure it's consistent throughout. I'm sorry, I'm better than AI." We're all better than AI. AI is just better at pretending it can do the job. Go ahead, ask me how I know. Yes, obviously, I tried translating with AI. Ah, you can't fire me, I'm self-employed! I've been playing with AI since the fall, when it started stealing my job for real. I could either declare it evil and turn into one of those people who will never get a smartphone, or use it to my advantage. I'm practical. I chose the second option. AI can't translate for me. It can't write either--unfortunately, ChatGPT can't vouch for the fact that this article is my idea, that it's my gym, my ignorant civil servant and my punchline. Just take my word for it, pun slightly intended. And while this article is written by yours truly, you bet I'm going to spell-check it. I probably won't use AI; I have Antidote. But maybe I will ask Claude's opinion, and if one of the suggestions is smart--cutting a paragraph, for instance, or clarifying a sentence--I might accept it. When I started translating 15 years ago, we used to paste uncooperative sentences into Google Translate to see if it had interesting ways to phrase things differently. Then came DeepL--same idea. What do you think? That we're translating with pen and pencil? That your accountant doesn't use fancy Excel formulas? That your manager formatted the PowerPoint alone? That your favourite restaurant doesn't Google trendy recipes? We are professionals using tools. But that's just what they are--tools. One of my clients has insane style guides, plural. I'm talking about 500-page documents detailing the proper way to format quotes and the one true way to insert footnotes. I fed them to ChatGPT for the final checks--it can kind of flag when I break a rule. I've also used AI to extract specialized terminology from reference documents and build my own glossaries. It's faster than Ctrl+F, and less likely to make me scream. But everything has to be double-checked, triple-checked. It's another way of working, not a magic button. AI isn't replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached. It invents acronyms and organization names, forgets to translate entire sentences, ignores the provided terminology unless repeatedly threatened, and occasionally misses the point completely. Which is why we--translators, writers, editors, and other professionals--shouldn't suddenly be paid less because AI exists. Should you pay your roofer less because he uses a hammer instead of his bare hands? But judging by her amused smile, my civil servant wasn't getting the point. "But AI is getting better all the time!" "What do you do?" I asked, changing tack. "I'm the Director General, Human Resources and Corporate Services, but I'm currently in an acting position for Workforce Planning and Resources Management." This actually made sense to my Ottawa brain. Told you, I'm a translator. "Great. So, do you use AI a lot at work?" "Oh, I can't! It's really not reliable enough." For fuck's sake. And she works in human resources! Please leave this field empty[ ] Curiosity makes for good stories. Stories from the road and beyond. [ ] [Send me the next story] Thank you for subscribing. I'll send new stories your way whenever they're published. Close Making a Living Meanwhile... in Ottawa Share this article FacebookWhatsAppEmailXRedditLinkedIn [4cf42a0b3b82a4ec239f] About the author Juliette French by birth, Canadian by choice, nomadic by instinct. I travel, write, and get into just enough trouble to make good stories. View stories Related posts Ottawa, June 2026 Author Seeks Publisher I Tried to Get Published... Then I Discovered Querying 1 week ago Ottawa, May 2026 The Blogging Experience The Story I Didn't Know I Was Writing 2 weeks ago Ottawa, December 2025 Winter (and Extreme Weather) in Canada Seriously, This Brand of Canadian Winter Should Be Illegal December 11, 2025 Leave a reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment * [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [ ] Email me when a new story is published. [Replies to my comments] Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting. [Post Comment] 14 comments * [4c0a432] G says: June 10, 2026 at 7:10 am "AI isn't replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached." AMEN! AI is a tool, and whilst I would've given my right arm for it when I was a Technical Writer for the same reasons you expand on, it would still require me to do the work of learning the application, writing the instructions, testing them, amending them... The hype is too big, the crash will come, soon? Reply + [4cf42a0] Juliette says: June 10, 2026 at 6:04 pm I hope you're no longer a technical writer because you choose to move on to another adventure, and that AI didn't steal your job! I don't want to read or use technical writing "invented" by AI. It should crash. But I'm worried about the long-lasting damages to the workforce. So many jobs were devalued because "eh, it's not rocket science, AI can do it!" Reply * [cc854db] Christiane says: June 10, 2026 at 11:35 am Unpopular opinion= i hate ChatGPT. AI has infiltrated the accounting field. Some are good and some not great and can have detrimental effects to companies. I like AI productivity tools, but i only use a few. I am waiting for the AI bubble to burst patiently... Reply + [4cf42a0] Juliette says: June 10, 2026 at 6:06 pm It's a popular opinion with my people! I believe AI *tools* can be useful. It still takes a brain to use them, along with expertise, judgment, etc. I certainly won't do blind accounting with AI, I'll keep my human accountant. Reply * [45da667] gurupanguji says: June 10, 2026 at 3:31 pm AI is great at taking away _your_ job but it's not reliable enough to do mine is the Knoll's Law / Gell Mann Amnesia effect of AI. Lovely write up. Reply + [4cf42a0] Juliette says: June 10, 2026 at 6:06 pm Thank you! I have to look it up, thank you for the insightful comment. Reply * "Zhi Jie Shang Chuan Gei ChatGPTJiu Xing Liao Ma ?"----Zhuan Ye Yi Zhe Yan Zhong De AIJu Xian Yu Gong Zuo Liu Zhen Xiang says: June 12, 2026 at 2:34 pm [...] Yuan Wen Lian Jie :Hacker News [...] Reply * Por que o Upload para o ChatGPT nao e a Solucao Final - Big_SaaS says: June 12, 2026 at 2:44 pm [...] A verdadeira inovacao nao reside em enviar arquivos para uma interface, mas em construir sistemas que processam esses dados antes mesmo de chegarem ao modelo. A arquitetura de um sistema robusto deve incluir etapas de pre-processamento, como limpeza de OCR, extracao de entidades e estruturacao em JSON. O artigo original, que discute as nuances dessa abordagem, pode ser consultado no Artigo de Origem. [...] Reply * [137a607] Gurkan says: June 12, 2026 at 3:39 pm Holy crap I laughed hard at "Oh, I can't! It's really not reliable enough." Reply + [4cf42a0] Juliette says: June 12, 2026 at 9:41 pm This is a true story and when she said it, I was hesitating between laughing and face palming Reply * "Ni Bu Zhi Jie Shang Chuan Dao ChatGPTMa ?" - ChatGPTTan Suo Zhe says: June 12, 2026 at 5:11 pm [...] Lai Yuan :Hacker News * 24hZui Re [...] Reply * [c654b8e] California_Lifer says: June 12, 2026 at 6:06 pm Does the country of the AI's origin make any difference in translation quality? Let's say I want to translate between English and Mandarin. ChatGPT was built in California, of course. China has AI models too, such as Z.ai GLM-5.1. Would using Z.ai produce a better result because it was built by native Mandarin speakers and perhaps trained on more local resources? I wonder if anyone has ever tested this. Reply + [4cf42a0] Juliette says: June 12, 2026 at 9:44 pm This is an excellent question, and I've been wondering the same! I briefly tested on Chinese and I found ChatGPT was very "international Chinese", not "mainland Chinese". I.e. no slang, for instance. Generally speaking, I find it has a North American biais. For instance, if I ask questions about food (in either French or English), the suggestions are always very North American-peanut butter, Greek yogurt, almonds... not the kind of snacks an average French would reach out for. I have to try Z.ai. Reply * ChatGPT e la morte della traduzione: Spoiler, non e cosi facile (purtroppo) - Associazione ROOT APS says: June 12, 2026 at 7:13 pm [...] Source: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?" 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