Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Sucking on your addictive LinkedIn security blanket?

For too many people in certain domains—translation is one of them—LinkedIn is an addictive security blanket, wrapped in and protected by a delusion that is promoted by a company that knows that selling addictive delusions. particularly to a population of people who are confused and uneasy about the future, is highly profitable.

Religions have worked that game for as long as they have existed. In a sense, because LinkedIn users, similar to people claiming to have a faith, apparently don’t require evidence to believe in something, belief in the platform could be treated as a religion, without the tax exemption, of course

Microsoft fed me a post recently from a freelance translator that evoked over a hundred comments. The post and the comments were discussing how to “succeed” and attain “reach” by posting on LinkedIn.

What in the world are these people talking about? Does harvesting a large number of impressions and comments (by colleagues, not clients) on LinkedIn mean success? Does it gain translators clients that pay them money? The evidence of that is extremely slim, and nobody seems to even bring that aspect of the platform up. It’s the irrelevant elephant in the living room where people are talking about LinkedIn “success” and “reach” as if these meant something on a social media platform that purports to be a business networking platform but is actually nothing of the kind for translators.

I’ve heard a number of translator colleagues say they made a LinkedIn account but got nothing from it, and they far outnumber that ones who say that they have acquired clients because of their LinkedIn presence. Although I wonder about what kind of clients and the veracity of such claims—LinkedIn has an established reputation as a bullshitting platform—such cases might exist, but with AI-using agencies far along in their move away from professional translators, the constellation of conditions, circumstances, and skills required for freelancers to acquire the direct clients they need to *perhaps* survive means that the value of interacting on LinkedIn approaches zero.

The freelance translators most likely to survive will be those who realize the value of real-world networking with potential clients. LinkedIn is not the real world they need to be active in. Translators who don’t understand what that means and don’t try to find out will not survive, and it is safe to say that most won’t.

There will be a small number of exceptional survivors, of course, but the drastically changed reality will preclude most freelance translators from surviving.

I’ll make this short.

If you’re a freelance translator and thinking of continuing to work for translation agencies, your chances of surviving by translating more than another year or two are extremely slim.

If you can change careers entirely or at least break away from AI-using agencies —in 2026, this means the agencies that support almost all freelancers—you might survive for a while. But most freelancers can’t break away from agencies, because of their circumstances, their preferences and personalities, or their skill sets. For them, it is over—finished, gone, and not coming back.

Shameful and non-shameful use of AI

I don’t use AI when translating documents for clients, for the simply reason that I don’t need AI to translate, I don’t like the translations it produces, and I’m the translator I present to my client as the person who cares about and will execute the translations of their documents. Using AI would be a betrayal.

Translation-brokering agencies, which are well along in their replacement of human professionals with AI—and that leaves former translators with only extremely low-paid and mind-numbing post-editing work—are in a different situation.

The reason is simple. Almost all translation that is paid for by translation consumers is done by entities that are not themselves involved in executing translations, beyond purchasing the translations and then, if necessary, purchasing editing thereof before selling them. That is the case now, and it has been the case for many years, from long before humans found themselves being replaced by AI. Since entities that sell translation are only very rarely involved in doing translations, it makes sense for them to move away from expensive human professionals, and they are succeeding in that move.

Top Page of my company website

That said, for a process or task that I do not purport to do myself or sell to clients as a practitioner, I am more willing to use AI. If you look in the upper-right corner of my company website pages, you will see a hamburger menu icon. I have manually written the HTML for my considerable number of webpages for many years, resisting adding such a feature, not understanding how to do it, either with or without JavaScript. I gave in the other day and used Claude.ai to build that feature into my website. It took less than three minutes to obtain the required patch of html markup and the associated JavaScript, required no cash outlay, and it gave me what I needed with just a plain-language prompt of about three lines describing what I wanted.

There is a putative environmental impact—it is much smaller, of course, than the impact resulting from building a fake video of a deceased celebrity or a dancing cat—but I am not at all ashamed I did that. That would not be the case if I were in the business of selling webpage designs.

Returning to translation, the translations I do are mine and will continue that way, as I continue to resist the mindless rush into a world where translators surrender to AI-using brokers and professionals of all sorts outsource not only their writing but also their thinking to a collection of software commands. That’s not my style, and I cannot see that changing anytime soon.