(September 13, 2025)The End of Freelance Translating for Agencies as a Realistic CareerNo amount of complaining and delusional predictions by freelancers will turn the tide. Freelance translating is dead unless you can acquire clients not using AI.
Although it is arguably disingenuous and unethical to allow people to continue to believe that freelance translating is a realistic career (it is not if you can only work for agencies), I have reversed my decision to removed all content aimed at colleague translators, with a disclaimer, however.
Most freelance JA-EN translators are reliant on translation-brokering agencies as sources of translation work. Such agencies that sell most of the JA-to-EN translation that is purchased are quickly migrating to using AI for translation, thereby obviating the need to purchase translation services from freelancers. Post-editing of AI output is offered by agencies at ridiculously low rates, because they correctly realize that many freelancers are trapped, with no reasonable options to make a living. It is best for freelancers to pull themselves out of the trap.
Given this reality, and particularly the reality that almost no agency-dependent freelancers will be able to replace their agency clients with direct clients who are not (yet) using AI, I had decided to stop trying to educate colleagues on survival, but have reversed that decision and will restore a large amount of content that might be helpful to colleagues, with the full understanding that much of what I suggest cannot be adopted by more than a tiny portion of the freelance translator population, because of the brokered structure of the freelancing world and individual decisions made possible and encouraged by that structure.
Important Disclaimer !
Note, however, that just being a good translator will not assure you of survival. In order to survive, you need to:
- sell to direct clients (and that means largely face-to-face interactions, and certainly doesn't mean posting on LinkedIn), and
- have field-specific knowledge that is convincing to a direct client in an in-person interaction.
The above points strongly to the strategy of abandoning the idea that everything you need to do can be done online. That strategy will no longer work in a world where, unless they go in-house somewhere, freelancers need to compete with agencies for direct clients.