On September 7, I participated in the JPAA (Japan Patent Attorneys Association) seminar which assessed the effects of machine translation, followed by the Miura Translation Forum (Tomii Translation Circle) on September 8/9. Both seminars primarily taught about improvements in machine translation accuracy.
I heard that machine translation is increasingly improving, but it is still necessary to have machine translations checked by humans. Naturally, this increases so-called "post-editing" jobs—namely, editing after translation. Such jobs are outsourced to ordinary translators, which is also common among translators in the U.S.
Additionally, though post-editing usually meant revising human translations, recently this kind of work has come to mean checking machine translations!
From a checker's perspective, checking human translations is easier than checking machine translations because the phrasing in human translation is expected to be correct in most every case. This clearly suggests that humans are still heavily supporting machines in the translation industry.
Furthermore, there is a recent trend in which translation companies are practically forcing human translators to translate alongside machines, which requires using accumulated digital memories to translate certain words or sentences and thus is not complete machine translation.
In summary, there are currently three workflow methods.
I think that the third type of workflow will decrease and the other two will increase.
More importantly, I believe that machine-based checking will not be expected, and final checking by humans will be imperative. Accordingly, I have an optimistic view that human translations will be altered but human translators will not be completely deprived of jobs.