Recent trends in the freelance translating business, brought about by AI-using translation-brokering agencies, have seriously affected numerous colleagues. That is led me to cease attempts to help them survive. Most will not survive as translators, and the ones who will survive will do it without advice from me.
There is a great amount of delusion and denial about what is happening and actually has happened already. That said, it might be my imagination, but I sense that there is an increasing awareness among freelance translators of where things stand. There is still, however, a lot of discussion among freelancers about how good or bad AI is at translating, but it’s almost all non-productive and shouldn’t matter to translators.
What matters to working professional translators needing to make a living is whether AI is good enough to replace them in the translation business as it is structured, and it has turned out that it is. Those who realize they are at immediate risk, having already lost significant amounts of translation work, and those who have already been forced out of translation entirely understand that.
Because most freelance translators work in a brokered business environment in which they do not and cannot deal with the consumers of their work, as long as the intermediaries are successfully using AI to replace them—and they are being successful—the quality of AI translation is irrelevant, because it is succeeding for freelancers’ clients and their agency-clients’ clients.
The strategies that this situation makes necessary—chiefly being those for acquiring clients not using AI themselves—cannot be adopted by more than a very small number of freelancers.
No amount of denial or criticism of AI translation will change that. It’s already happening and accelerating its effect of destroying the livelihoods of freelancers. And the sometimes-heard suggestion that freelancers should adopt AI themselves as a tool is only a viable strategy if they can compete with agencies for direct clients, which very few freelancers can do, for reasons not enough freelancers seem to understand or can bring themselves to admit.
Freelancers themselves, translation organizations, and universities need to discard the approach of looking away and failing to encourage honest and critical assessment of the business environment.
Such behavior does nothing to further or protect the interests of translators and of students aiming at becoming translators, nor does it help them make the tough decisions that have become necessary. What is called for is courage, not rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.