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.
