Executive Summary: With the widespread use of AI by translation agencies, the agency work model considered by most freelance translators to be a given is coming to an end, and low-paid post-editing will be attractive only to translators with no other choices. Acquisition of direct clients is one way to buy some time, but the hurdles are high, and some of the hurdles are probably unexpected by people who might casually say “Well, I guess I’ll just have to go after direct clients.”
As translation brokers order less and less translation from professional translators, one way for some professionals to buy some time before being swallowed up by an AI pogrom is to acquire direct clients, which are generally later adopters of AI than are the brokers, the latter being well on their way to full implementation of a business model calling for AI, followed by post-editing of some variety, to eliminate the need for them to pay for professional translation.
The smaller agencies that will remain and continue to order translation from professionals will be able to support only a tiny portion of the translator population. The big players using AI control most of the market.
But is acquisition of direct clients a reasonable goal for freelancers? It depends, of course, on the individual and on the specific market and language pair, but there are some very solid reasons why it will be extremely difficult or impossible for most individuals to acquire direct clients, and some of the reasons might not be obvious.
Your most valuable asset as a freelancer is the very thing that will make it extremely difficult to acquire direct clients. In competing with translation brokers, most of the major ones of which have extremely few and sometimes no working translators in their employ—this being particularly true of the US brokers selling JA-to-EN translation—your position as an individual translator can be a great selling point. It precisely because you are an individual, however, that you will face extremely difficult hurdles and will not have the freedoms brokers build for themselves by hiding behind an Internet presence and clueless project managers. The most important freedom of brokers is freedom to lie with impunity.
Unlike translation brokers, as a freelancer, lying will not work. Being an individual, you will inevitably be seen as an individual translator by clients, and that will make it impossible to adopt one of the most effective strategies used by brokers to sell their services, bare-faced lying.
Translation brokers have become accustomed to being able to tell the most ridiculous fairy tales about what they can do and how they do it, with almost no risk of being found out. Their clients seldom catch them out. I have discussed some of these lies with some of their clients, and there is usually a very surprised reaction. Many clients don’t think much about what happens after they issue a purchase order.
The lies you cannot get away with as a freelancer are various.
Unlike translation brokers, as a freelancer, you cannot lie about your capacity. Brokers can claim to “have” a team of thousands of translators and do not fear that clients will be able to judge the veracity of that claim. But you as an individual cannot do that.
You’re it. Prospects will know you are just you, even if you form a company and attempt to position yourself as a corporate entity. And you might think you can start up a website claiming to “have” hundreds or even thousands of translators on “your team.” This is a device used by the major translation brokers. The trick is that, although the brokers themselves generally “have” no translators to speak of, their clients have become accustomed to telling themselves that it’s ok, because the translation seller “has” all those translators. As a freelancer, you won’t be able to make that work, unless you wish to lie as do the brokers. Is that something you want to do?
Unlike translation brokers, you cannot hide behind an Internet presence to avoid direct client interaction. This reality is going to be troubling to many freelancers who have become used to working in front of their computers, from “registering” with a broker, through order receipt and job delivery. But that mode of operation needs to be discarded if you expect to succeed at acquiring direct clients. You need to learn what specific people to meet, to get out and meet those people, and to be convincing when you meet them.
Unlike translation brokers, as a freelancer, you cannot lie about your expertise. To avoid losing their clients to freelance translators, because translation brokers almost never allow clients to interact with or even know the names of the translators from whom the brokers purchase translations for resale to clients, clients almost never can verify the actual abilities of a translator, save for a translation test that might even be done by someone other than the translator to whom their work is subsequently given by the broker. Brokers can generally get away with telling clients that they “have” a large number of domain experts in “their” team of translators.
As a freelancer selling translations to a direct client, however, although you might have been able to fool a totally translation-clueless and domain-clueless project manager and survive if their clients are not sharp enough to detect problems, that’s not going to work if you are selling to translation consumers yourself.
If you are positioning yourself as an individual domain expert, as you will need to do to acquire direct clients, you are going to have to demonstrate that expertise in direct interaction with clients who themselves are domain experts. You don’t have the freedom to lie and hope for the best, as is done by translation brokers. And when faced with a direct client across the table, Googling terminology is not going to work.
Unlike translation brokers, as a freelancer, you cannot easily hide. Translation brokers can create beautiful looking websites and the larger once have actual physical addresses, although some mid-level and even major online-only brokers publish virtual addresses purporting to be the address of their company or publish no address at all. They can be very confident that they will not be phoned or visited by a client wanting to speak to a translator.
As an individual, that will not work. Potential clients will need to know where you are, sometimes for tax purposes. In fact, you will almost always need to meet potential clients directly (particularly in markets such as Japan) and to do that you will probably need to discard the idea of operating from a geographically remote location, as discussed below.
Unlike translation brokers, as a freelancer, where you live matters. This is because, unlike brokers, you will need to directly interact with specific individuals in selling your services. This is something that translation brokers can avoid, by simply inserting a clueless project manager into the loop and trusting that clients will assume the project manager can contact the translators for their work.
In order to seek out and interact directly with potential direct clients, you should be operating in close geographic proximity to those clients. Some translators live in areas so remote that such interaction is virtually impossible or at least very costly.
Unlike translation brokers, you will need to seek out specific individuals as sales targets. Whereas the major translation brokers can get away with creating a killer website and waiting for email orders for translation to arrive, that is almost never going to work for individual freelancers, who need to be more pro-active in selling.
You need to approach specific individuals, but you need to learn who those individuals are. Sending emails to a general email address of a potential client is not going to work. General corporate email addresses, even if they are available, are bombarded by countless sales emails and are monitored by gatekeepers, who will effectively block your email from reaching anybody with a need for translation or ordering authority.
You need to expend the necessary effort to learn who the specific people to approach are. It’s known as sales, something which is apparently terrifying to many translators, and means you will need to interact with people outside of the translation business.
If you live in your source-language country and are unable to sell convincingly in the source language, you are at a serious disadvantage. This is one hurdle that will be a deal-breaker for most JA-to-EN translators I know living in Japan. Early-on acquisition of sales-ready spoken ability in your source language will go a long way to enabling your success if you live in your source-language country. Without that ability, you will probably be limited to approaching expats working in foreign firms in your country of residence, and that seriously limits the possibility of success.
The above is but a short catalog of reasons why acquiring direct clients is not a slam dunk. Inertia and the realization of these difficulties could be the major reason for translators going into denial about what is happening to translation because of AI, but it’s happening as sure as anything you can point to in the translation business.
At a translation conference in Cairns in 2019, I gave a presentation on getting from tier two (agency-dependent translation) to tier one (dealing with direct clients). I had some specific suggestions about what is expected of someone working with direct clients. That was significantly before the recent AI translation hype and adoption by agencies, and I must admit I did not realize the suggestions I made would grow in relevance in the ensuing five years.