As I have written in numerous places, freelance translators dependent on agencies are facing an existential crisis. But also as I have written elsewhere, I am powerless to change that and no longer interested in educating freelancers about how they might survive. Too many want to believe comfortable fairytales.
That said, the following still warrants repeating, because too may people just don’t get it or continue to look away.
Both overly optimistic freelance translators and their self-serving translation organizations continue to promote fairytales about culture, nuance, and the risks and evils of AI in translation, while they studiously avoid discussion or even mention of the reason translators won’t survive.
For people who haven’t noticed, perhaps because they have been sleepwalking for the past few years, here is the real-world situation.
Almost no freelancers are capable of acquiring the clients served by the agencies they have been conditioned to be dependent on, those agencies are quickly replacing them with AI, and very few of the remaining professionals can replace their agency clients with a better client demographic.
The executive summary is that translating is ending for most freelancers.
Translators need to wake up, and their organizations need to stop tacitly or actively promoting delusional hopes of survival and start looking at and openly acknowledging the immutable root cause of the problem, which is the two-tiered brokered structure of the translation business, in which almost all freelancers are relegated to serving as part of a captive labor pool, with their upward mobility having been carefully designed out of the system.
As long as that system stays in place—and there is no reason to think it will change—most freelance translators will shortly need to make some tough career and life decisions.
