Every day in every way it’s getting sillier and sillier to think that learning Japanese with the goal of earning a living by translating is a good strategy.
Universities are surely not teaching Japanese students aiming at translating for a living what’s waiting for them when they get out of school, because it’s not very much, and it’s very unlikely to be anything approaching what could be called translation. It would, naturally, not be in the interest of universities to turn off students with the grim truth.
Post-editing AI-generated translation—most of what “linguists” are being offered to do for peanuts—is as much translating as tightening bolts on a car before final delivery is “manufacturing cars.” And the idea that it will be faster and therefore compensate for the drastic reduction in rates is simply not informed by the reality. That reality is that translation sellers know they can get away with offering very low earning potential for post-editing, thanks to a ready and essentially captive labor supply of former translators with few other options and bills to pay.
Translators’ organizations appear to be at least tacitly going along with the delusion that things might get better for translators or at least won’t totally collapse, because “humans will always be needed” (loose bolts remain for low-paid labor to tighten).
The reality, however, is that things are already collapsing for large numbers of agency-dependent freelance translators.
People need to discard aspirational rationalizations and delusions, recognize what is actually happening, and act accordingly. And that does not realistically involve continuing to chase after a career that exists for only a tiny portion of extremely fortunate people. Freelance translating has essentially ended. Let’s get real about it.