The translator, an endangered species?

The first public machine translation experiment took place in 1954. Led by researchers from IBM and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, it was destined to make possible high-quality automatic translation from Russian into English in a few years. Since this first attempt, claims that machines could soon be replacing translators became usual. In 2018, Microsoft announced that their Chinese to English news translations were of comparable quality to human translation. The paradox however, is that although translation systems are accessible to most people, the number of people working in the translation industry is higher than ever before – an approximate 600,000 people in the world. In this context, do professionals really have a reason to worry?