Executive Summary: Despite protests, delusion, and denial, freelance translating has effectively reached its end as a realistic career choice. People thinking about freelance translating should think again; those engaged in it already need to be ready to look elsewhere and soon, or be ready to retire.
I think that freelancers who think that AI might help them do translation might be correct, but it won’t rescue them from the AI tsunami that has hit their profession, because they won’t be able to receive translation work from the only clients (agencies) that most freelancers can acquire. Even translation consumers will go away; it will just take them a bit longer.
Freelancers who constantly post aspirational predictions that humans will always be needed are, at best, only partially correct, because they will be needed, not to do translation, but only for extremely low-paid repair work on AI output. Translation organizations, faced with loss of relevance, are also guilty of promoting this “AI will not replace us” delusion, without mentioning that it is necessary to have clients. AI is already well along in the process of replacing their members as translators.
There are translators who counter by positing that they can make enough doing post-editing. They either
- were making so little doing translation that being paid peanuts to post-edit is enough, or
- it hasn’t occurred to them—or is too painful to contemplate—that the growing cohort of out-of-work translators will drive post-editing rates down to an even lower rate than they are at present.
Confident in the knowledge that large numbers of desperate translators will be available as post-editing labor, agencies have no obligation, no inclination, and—more significantly—no business need to allow translators to earn what they formerly able to earn. The rates are already low, for both the reduced amount of remaning translation work and the post-editing that is replacing that work, and the rates continue to drop.
If agencies did have such an obligation, there would be no reason to adopt AI in the first place. For agencies, translation is a business, not a charitable enterprise aimed at rescuing freelancers who have lost their earning ability.
And we also have the totally delusional freelancers who claim that clients (theirs are almost all translation-brokering agencies) will come back to them when they see how bad AI translation is. This optimism is totally unwarranted, regardless of how many related fairytales are posted online.
Freelance translation for agencies has reached the end of the road, and I would never advise someone to learn a foreign language with the aim of building a career as a freelance translator. I couldn’t be so deceptive (or so stupid).
Because freelancing is not the only thing that is facing demise, I have preserved some of my writings that have disappeared from the JAT website on my parent website.
