I have written more about this elsewhere, but here are some renewed suggestions to freelance translators who are studiously ignoring the elephant in their living room.
- In the face of a rapidly crumbling translation agency work model, undertake to avoid denial and avoidance behaviors. They will get you nowhere. Believing something that feels good is not nearly as useful as realizing what is true.
- Stop complaining about cheap translation brokers. The brokers that control the vast majority of the translation market don’t care, are not listening to you, and won’t change.
- Discard the notion that continuing to deal with the above-noted translation brokers can be somehow made to work. It cannot. It’s ending.
- Stop lecturing on social media (including LinkedIn) about how AI is not good enough and will lead to great problems. The people who you think you are addressing cannot be moved and are already figuring out that AI is good enough for them, and the people you need as clients don’t yet need the lectures and, in any event, are not going to social media to find translation providers; they purchase translation from people who actively sell to them.
- Discard the notion that what you need to survive is to adapt to new technology. Technology alone doesn’t provide the more essential pieces to the puzzle of survival. Much more is needed.
- Discard the notion that what you need to do to survive can be done sitting in front of your computer. It cannot. Because AI-using brokers have made aiming at direct clients an important survival strategy, the low-risk, recluse-translator approach is no longer useful or effective.
- Invest in yourself by acquiring field-specific knowledge. You might be able to fool clueless project managers at a broker, but you cannot Google your way out of a tight spot when facing a direct client who is a subject-matter expert.
- Learn the identities of specific individuals who control translation demand at specific direct clients and interact with those specific people.
- Consider the path that you have traveled thus far and honestly assess whether you can do what you will need to do to survive, realizing that what it takes might be nearly impossible or extremely painful (sales, getting out from in front of your computer, meeting people, and more).
That’s it. Go for it, or figure out where else to go.