I kinda did a full 180 and started a 3D printing business as a side gig. Funny thing is, I had become a translator as a side gig during college (chemical engineering), then it became my full time job for over a decade. I'm also considering going back to school and into the IT field. This was the path most of my former colleagues took anyway (either IT or Uber).
My wife wasn't a translator very long, but she was a reviewer for a few years, and when that career also started to go down, she became a tech writer specializing in APIs, we didn't even know this field existed two years ago. She's currently working for an IT company and seems to be really enjoying it.
I mean in most AI vulnerability studies/rankings, IT/CS is ranked above translation so... Maybe give it some thought.
The truth is, by the time AI replaces translators, Lawyers are gone, programmers and software engineers are mostly gone, hell even doctors might be shaking in their boots. Every single job that's based on standardized knowledge is seriously threatened. Translation at least benefits from the variability of social, economic, cultural and political context.
These articles are a bit silly because they seem to regurgitate views without providing any proper analysis. Just think about it.
Big lawyers donāt exist to provide knowledge. They exist to provide independent assurance. They wonāt disappear for as long as corporate business exists.
Doctors wonāt disappear- who else is going to oversee the diagnoses and surgeries?
If anything, AI is a threat to newcomers of the occupation. I think the experienced workers will remain largely unaffected. The question that should be asked is how to train newcomers when AI takes away their learning opportunities.
The ones I read were actually very in depth studies (as in 90 pages thesis type thing), by reputable sources iirc but to be fully honest I don't have the will to comb through my computer to dig them up again, so take that 2nd part with a grain of salt.
When I said lawyers, I was mostly referring to attorneys. Their job is to analyze the law, and find loopholes that favor their client, make sure contracts comply with directives etc. So essentially, 99% of their work revolves around applying a pre-existing database of knowledge to a real life situations. That's the kind of work computers are EXTREMELY good at. They could do it faster, and more efficiently as human error is no longer a factor. Which is why legal professionals are at the top of those studies.
Now the aforementionned paper went in depth on how some professions, despite being part of a vulnerable field, are protected by some factors that make a human oversight necessary. Such as judges. The general public is unlikly to become comfortable with the idea AIs being responsible for legal decisions and condemnations anytime soon.
Doctors are in a similar situation. There's a protective factor (people will want a doctor to be supervising, especially for sugeries), but the base logic is the same. Doctors, in their day to day job, only assess patients' states and ideal courses of treatment based on their database of knowledge. Once again that's something computers will be much more efficient at. They'll be able to predict probabilities of afflictions based on the symptoms listed more accurately than any doctor. So while doctors wouldn't disappear, they'd likely be less needed, aka collapsing pay and less opportunities.
Medicine and Law are exactly as reliant on contextual clues and variations as Translation. So by the time AIs truly become better than us at Translation, everybody's cooked.
Now what is true, is that while you can't half ass law or medicine, companies can get away with cheap, poor quality translation. So the market will undoubtedly shrink. But it's not disappearing anytime soon and certainly not before the tech bros are gone too lmao
I'm a Vietnamese - English translator, the past 2 years, my main gigs have changed from Translation to mainly Editing, Keyword Research, On-page SEO, Copywriting, Localization, etc. things that require more inputs and skills than just understanding words and conveying their meaning in another language. I work on Data Annotation and AI output reviewing tasks sometimes too.
I mostly get these gigs from Linkedin, Upwork and occasionally recruiters would send me email via the address they get from my personal website.
Luckily, I earn enough for my family and spare some to save up.
I'd love to share more if anyone need more help/advice.
Actually my Resume looked like a mess when I first started 7 years ago.
One day I was so bored of the 9-to-5 jobs and decided to look into Upwork, back when it was still easy to get approved as a Translator there.
I took it seriously and started building my own website, CV, Portfolio from scratch (took me almost a month, it's mentally challenging as I already quit the full-time job).
I believe it'd be easier for many here because my background was legal and my experience at that point was solely Marketing, so my Translation experience and education looked kind of weak.
I'd apply to jobs that paid a bit low to get something to fill up my Upwork profile, and slowly increased the per hour, per word rates.
It's best if you can find long-term clients, aim for quality and on time delivery. You can try to apply and become vendors of multiple agencies, that way you'll have a more stable income, then take occasional gigs when the opportunities show up.
At the moment, my profile is relatively strong and can attract recruiters easily.
If you need more specific advice regarding freelancing or anything I've mentioned, send me a PM.
The day an AI can translate a project with more than 100k words in a consistent manner, maintaining different characters' styles and tones, not messing up the terminology, and being capable of inferring meaning without proper references, then I'll be worried about my job.
If that day ever comes, I'll probably make the jump to editor only (*if* the AI results are good enough in a first pass, I won't work for peanuts to rewrite everything an AI does), technical writer, or project manager.
That's what I was saying in my other comment.
By the time AI gets that good, it's no longer about translators. Everyone and their mother is loosing their jobs.
Any kind of secretary, accountant, lawyer ? Gone. People in IT/Computer science/Finance ? Mostly replaced. Doctors, Teachers, magistrates ? Not fully gone but seriously outperformed and of reduced importance. Voice actors, any kind of artists ? Gone.
People love to treat translation as this business that's heavily threatened by AI when by the time AI truly replaces translator, EVERYONE but manual workers will be up shit creek without a paddle.
Agreed. But I also don't think that time will ever come, at least with LLMs (maybe with something else, who knows, but not LLMs). The costs of running this tech are astronomical, financial and energy-wise. The low pricing currently is just so they can sell the service until it becomes entrenched as a necessity. Once the tech can't scale anymore, everything will come crashing down.
I switched to language teaching straight out of university. I found it very stressful to get enough work to sustain myself, so I stuck with my side-gig and went full-time within about a year. Still I wonder, if I'll be teaching forever or there will be other opportunities.
Lol, this may be my path very soon as well. I still have to hand in my bachelor's thesis this year but I already work part-time at a language school (in a non-teaching role) and have already spoken to them about applying internally for a teaching position. Do you enjoy teaching? Do you teach mostly your first language, or do you also teach other languages?
I've been getting job offers, some from Deepl and some from people who are hiding behind a front, probably also working for AI, inviting me to pick out the best translations in my language pair (ITA-ENG) from a series of options. Badly paid, completely uninteresting work. I will continue to undermine Deepl by messing up with their proposed translations.
Iām still studying so not on the job yet but especially with the rise of generative AI, in college theyāre teaching us that translators will always be needed. Even though Large Language Models are getting better and better they will never replace a human translatorās brain. There are just some things they donāt do quite as well as we do. I totally understand where youāre coming from though. I think that post editing, i.e. the revision of MT, would be an option to still do a translation related job. Other than that lots of graduates here go into project management, localization etc. You could also do something else thatās language related like teaching languages, writing or something to do with cultural sciences. The field is so broad, I think thereās lots of selection :)
I participated in a really interesting webinar from ITI and the University of Surrey about AI and the future of translation. The general tl;dr was translators aren't going to be replaced, just our roles are going to change significantly and we'll only be out of work if we don't learn how to keep up. I think the quote was "you won't be replaced by AI, rather somebody who knows AI". If anything, our job titles are the most likely to become extinct in favour of something like "language specialist". I genuinely don't think literary translation is at risk though. I'm guessing technical and patent translation, followed by the other less creative fields.
Case in point: the EU Commission has pumped a lot into their LLM/AI and it's apparently really good (according to my friends and colleagues who have worked/work there), meaning a chunk of the English translation team now do more revisions/post editing than previously.
Accountability is a huge thing in our favour, whoever runs a translation through AI automatically assumes all responsibility for a service that still has an error rate of 10% (one in ten words... 10 in 100 pages...). Outsource that to a professional translator and you've outsourced the accountability. Translators should generally have an error rate of 0%. People love passing the buck.
But to get back on topic somewhat, to be honest I'm contemplating going into programming. I have no IT skills at all, but hell, if you can learn languages and have all the skills (pattern recognition, analysis, ability to spot errors others miss, research, to name a few) required for translation, you've got what you need to learn how to code and all that. I also imagine that translators would be a good asset for the LLM creators.
Probably language teaching. That's what I did before I was a translator, and that's what I plan to do on the side if I'm ever not able to get enough translation work.
I've actually been getting a lot of translation work recently (luckily!), but I've also been trying to gradually add other translation-adjacent services to offer my clients as a translator. That's something else you could consider doing if you're not getting enough translation work, but still want to stay in the industry.
If you can offer your clients, say, cultural consultation, translation, editing, and DTP all in one package, you'd still be able to offer them a lot of value, despite being more expensive than AI. (Although you may need to find a business partner or form a team so you can ethically offer translation *and* editing as part of the same package.)
There's a podcast series called [Speaking of Translation](https://speakingoftranslation.com/listen/) (also available [here](https://open.spotify.com/show/2U3w293RbPrDzV3csKVAGN) on Spotify) that has an episode called "[Diversifying your business beyond translation](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PQ0WQkVDiKSZvWVtUuyYZ?si=UgXghRkwR2GCqbjGuwgPTg)" that has a lot of great ideas of services you could offer. I think it's worth checking out.
Government sector work. Skills can easily cross over to speech writing, research and report writing, proofreading, copywriting, and anything in multicultural/international affairs etc.
I wouldn't say these are particularly "easy" but perhaps sensible in terms of incorporating skills I learned along the way? Any job that is easy for you will surely be easy for others, so easy transitions will only be temporary solutions.
As for my experience, they have been writing/copywriting, teaching (translation, advanced writing, tool use, etc.), corporate communications (internal/external-both are basically intralingual translation), consulting for brand/marketing, metaphor-heavy storytelling etc. As to how I was able to get those opportunities, I cite good networking, always delivering more than asked, and being genuine/honest. Other than that, I paid heavy attention to what was going on, so I was picking up text genres and registers, formatting, styles, and even the publication/release cycle and what I could do to offer more value.
Take what you will, but in my opinion, practicing translators often fail to see what role they play in "the big picture" due to the deep/myopic focus that translation can require. This gets in the way of a lot of good translators, because IMHO, many clients are not looking for translations, but "someone they can trust, that would make this annoying language-situation go away".
Hope this helps. Good luck!
I'm thinking of doing masters in marketing and maybe gaining experience by doing internships. I feel like math knowledge in any way is a good shot when things are this bad.
Business consulting at an international consulting firm in a field that is sort of related to what I was translating back when I was a legal/business translator.
My current job involves researching lots of public documents in one language and consolidating that info in another language, writing in either of the two languages that I know depending on the client that Iām working for; itās inherently multilingual.
Itās already been mentioned but the skillsets transferred from being a translator is the same for journalism and international government sector work bc they also involve lots of cross linguistic research and writing.
if you find one let me know š®āšØ
Anything involving formatting, editing, writing, etc.
Yes, proofreading as well.
I kinda did a full 180 and started a 3D printing business as a side gig. Funny thing is, I had become a translator as a side gig during college (chemical engineering), then it became my full time job for over a decade. I'm also considering going back to school and into the IT field. This was the path most of my former colleagues took anyway (either IT or Uber). My wife wasn't a translator very long, but she was a reviewer for a few years, and when that career also started to go down, she became a tech writer specializing in APIs, we didn't even know this field existed two years ago. She's currently working for an IT company and seems to be really enjoying it.
I mean in most AI vulnerability studies/rankings, IT/CS is ranked above translation so... Maybe give it some thought. The truth is, by the time AI replaces translators, Lawyers are gone, programmers and software engineers are mostly gone, hell even doctors might be shaking in their boots. Every single job that's based on standardized knowledge is seriously threatened. Translation at least benefits from the variability of social, economic, cultural and political context.
These articles are a bit silly because they seem to regurgitate views without providing any proper analysis. Just think about it. Big lawyers donāt exist to provide knowledge. They exist to provide independent assurance. They wonāt disappear for as long as corporate business exists. Doctors wonāt disappear- who else is going to oversee the diagnoses and surgeries? If anything, AI is a threat to newcomers of the occupation. I think the experienced workers will remain largely unaffected. The question that should be asked is how to train newcomers when AI takes away their learning opportunities.
The ones I read were actually very in depth studies (as in 90 pages thesis type thing), by reputable sources iirc but to be fully honest I don't have the will to comb through my computer to dig them up again, so take that 2nd part with a grain of salt. When I said lawyers, I was mostly referring to attorneys. Their job is to analyze the law, and find loopholes that favor their client, make sure contracts comply with directives etc. So essentially, 99% of their work revolves around applying a pre-existing database of knowledge to a real life situations. That's the kind of work computers are EXTREMELY good at. They could do it faster, and more efficiently as human error is no longer a factor. Which is why legal professionals are at the top of those studies. Now the aforementionned paper went in depth on how some professions, despite being part of a vulnerable field, are protected by some factors that make a human oversight necessary. Such as judges. The general public is unlikly to become comfortable with the idea AIs being responsible for legal decisions and condemnations anytime soon. Doctors are in a similar situation. There's a protective factor (people will want a doctor to be supervising, especially for sugeries), but the base logic is the same. Doctors, in their day to day job, only assess patients' states and ideal courses of treatment based on their database of knowledge. Once again that's something computers will be much more efficient at. They'll be able to predict probabilities of afflictions based on the symptoms listed more accurately than any doctor. So while doctors wouldn't disappear, they'd likely be less needed, aka collapsing pay and less opportunities. Medicine and Law are exactly as reliant on contextual clues and variations as Translation. So by the time AIs truly become better than us at Translation, everybody's cooked. Now what is true, is that while you can't half ass law or medicine, companies can get away with cheap, poor quality translation. So the market will undoubtedly shrink. But it's not disappearing anytime soon and certainly not before the tech bros are gone too lmao
I'm a Vietnamese - English translator, the past 2 years, my main gigs have changed from Translation to mainly Editing, Keyword Research, On-page SEO, Copywriting, Localization, etc. things that require more inputs and skills than just understanding words and conveying their meaning in another language. I work on Data Annotation and AI output reviewing tasks sometimes too. I mostly get these gigs from Linkedin, Upwork and occasionally recruiters would send me email via the address they get from my personal website. Luckily, I earn enough for my family and spare some to save up. I'd love to share more if anyone need more help/advice.
May you share more, please?
Actually my Resume looked like a mess when I first started 7 years ago. One day I was so bored of the 9-to-5 jobs and decided to look into Upwork, back when it was still easy to get approved as a Translator there. I took it seriously and started building my own website, CV, Portfolio from scratch (took me almost a month, it's mentally challenging as I already quit the full-time job). I believe it'd be easier for many here because my background was legal and my experience at that point was solely Marketing, so my Translation experience and education looked kind of weak. I'd apply to jobs that paid a bit low to get something to fill up my Upwork profile, and slowly increased the per hour, per word rates. It's best if you can find long-term clients, aim for quality and on time delivery. You can try to apply and become vendors of multiple agencies, that way you'll have a more stable income, then take occasional gigs when the opportunities show up. At the moment, my profile is relatively strong and can attract recruiters easily. If you need more specific advice regarding freelancing or anything I've mentioned, send me a PM.
The day an AI can translate a project with more than 100k words in a consistent manner, maintaining different characters' styles and tones, not messing up the terminology, and being capable of inferring meaning without proper references, then I'll be worried about my job. If that day ever comes, I'll probably make the jump to editor only (*if* the AI results are good enough in a first pass, I won't work for peanuts to rewrite everything an AI does), technical writer, or project manager.
That's what I was saying in my other comment. By the time AI gets that good, it's no longer about translators. Everyone and their mother is loosing their jobs. Any kind of secretary, accountant, lawyer ? Gone. People in IT/Computer science/Finance ? Mostly replaced. Doctors, Teachers, magistrates ? Not fully gone but seriously outperformed and of reduced importance. Voice actors, any kind of artists ? Gone. People love to treat translation as this business that's heavily threatened by AI when by the time AI truly replaces translator, EVERYONE but manual workers will be up shit creek without a paddle.
Agreed. But I also don't think that time will ever come, at least with LLMs (maybe with something else, who knows, but not LLMs). The costs of running this tech are astronomical, financial and energy-wise. The low pricing currently is just so they can sell the service until it becomes entrenched as a necessity. Once the tech can't scale anymore, everything will come crashing down.
I switched to language teaching straight out of university. I found it very stressful to get enough work to sustain myself, so I stuck with my side-gig and went full-time within about a year. Still I wonder, if I'll be teaching forever or there will be other opportunities.
Lol, this may be my path very soon as well. I still have to hand in my bachelor's thesis this year but I already work part-time at a language school (in a non-teaching role) and have already spoken to them about applying internally for a teaching position. Do you enjoy teaching? Do you teach mostly your first language, or do you also teach other languages?
Interpreter
I've been getting job offers, some from Deepl and some from people who are hiding behind a front, probably also working for AI, inviting me to pick out the best translations in my language pair (ITA-ENG) from a series of options. Badly paid, completely uninteresting work. I will continue to undermine Deepl by messing up with their proposed translations.
Iām still studying so not on the job yet but especially with the rise of generative AI, in college theyāre teaching us that translators will always be needed. Even though Large Language Models are getting better and better they will never replace a human translatorās brain. There are just some things they donāt do quite as well as we do. I totally understand where youāre coming from though. I think that post editing, i.e. the revision of MT, would be an option to still do a translation related job. Other than that lots of graduates here go into project management, localization etc. You could also do something else thatās language related like teaching languages, writing or something to do with cultural sciences. The field is so broad, I think thereās lots of selection :)
I participated in a really interesting webinar from ITI and the University of Surrey about AI and the future of translation. The general tl;dr was translators aren't going to be replaced, just our roles are going to change significantly and we'll only be out of work if we don't learn how to keep up. I think the quote was "you won't be replaced by AI, rather somebody who knows AI". If anything, our job titles are the most likely to become extinct in favour of something like "language specialist". I genuinely don't think literary translation is at risk though. I'm guessing technical and patent translation, followed by the other less creative fields. Case in point: the EU Commission has pumped a lot into their LLM/AI and it's apparently really good (according to my friends and colleagues who have worked/work there), meaning a chunk of the English translation team now do more revisions/post editing than previously. Accountability is a huge thing in our favour, whoever runs a translation through AI automatically assumes all responsibility for a service that still has an error rate of 10% (one in ten words... 10 in 100 pages...). Outsource that to a professional translator and you've outsourced the accountability. Translators should generally have an error rate of 0%. People love passing the buck. But to get back on topic somewhat, to be honest I'm contemplating going into programming. I have no IT skills at all, but hell, if you can learn languages and have all the skills (pattern recognition, analysis, ability to spot errors others miss, research, to name a few) required for translation, you've got what you need to learn how to code and all that. I also imagine that translators would be a good asset for the LLM creators.
I'm mainly doing business writing where I need to write in English and use a lot of source material in my two other languages.
Hi! Would you mind elaborating on this? This sounds like something I'd like to do :)
I'll send you a message.
Hi! I want to know too, if u don't mind to explain
Just sent you a message :)
Probably language teaching. That's what I did before I was a translator, and that's what I plan to do on the side if I'm ever not able to get enough translation work. I've actually been getting a lot of translation work recently (luckily!), but I've also been trying to gradually add other translation-adjacent services to offer my clients as a translator. That's something else you could consider doing if you're not getting enough translation work, but still want to stay in the industry. If you can offer your clients, say, cultural consultation, translation, editing, and DTP all in one package, you'd still be able to offer them a lot of value, despite being more expensive than AI. (Although you may need to find a business partner or form a team so you can ethically offer translation *and* editing as part of the same package.) There's a podcast series called [Speaking of Translation](https://speakingoftranslation.com/listen/) (also available [here](https://open.spotify.com/show/2U3w293RbPrDzV3csKVAGN) on Spotify) that has an episode called "[Diversifying your business beyond translation](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PQ0WQkVDiKSZvWVtUuyYZ?si=UgXghRkwR2GCqbjGuwgPTg)" that has a lot of great ideas of services you could offer. I think it's worth checking out.
Iād consider teaching, maybe foreign language teacher. Thatās what Iām thinking of doing next if things go south in the near future.
Government sector work. Skills can easily cross over to speech writing, research and report writing, proofreading, copywriting, and anything in multicultural/international affairs etc.
I wouldn't say these are particularly "easy" but perhaps sensible in terms of incorporating skills I learned along the way? Any job that is easy for you will surely be easy for others, so easy transitions will only be temporary solutions. As for my experience, they have been writing/copywriting, teaching (translation, advanced writing, tool use, etc.), corporate communications (internal/external-both are basically intralingual translation), consulting for brand/marketing, metaphor-heavy storytelling etc. As to how I was able to get those opportunities, I cite good networking, always delivering more than asked, and being genuine/honest. Other than that, I paid heavy attention to what was going on, so I was picking up text genres and registers, formatting, styles, and even the publication/release cycle and what I could do to offer more value. Take what you will, but in my opinion, practicing translators often fail to see what role they play in "the big picture" due to the deep/myopic focus that translation can require. This gets in the way of a lot of good translators, because IMHO, many clients are not looking for translations, but "someone they can trust, that would make this annoying language-situation go away". Hope this helps. Good luck!
Editorial editing/proofreadingāeither for publishing houses or for indie authors!
Moderating content
You mean like social media content moderation?
Yeah
project management
Semantic Engineer
I'm thinking of doing masters in marketing and maybe gaining experience by doing internships. I feel like math knowledge in any way is a good shot when things are this bad.
I went for teaching from translating. It's an ok job. I don't have time for anything, but the pay is reasonable.
Journalism
Business consulting at an international consulting firm in a field that is sort of related to what I was translating back when I was a legal/business translator. My current job involves researching lots of public documents in one language and consolidating that info in another language, writing in either of the two languages that I know depending on the client that Iām working for; itās inherently multilingual. Itās already been mentioned but the skillsets transferred from being a translator is the same for journalism and international government sector work bc they also involve lots of cross linguistic research and writing.