The thought has occurred to me that, with a number of years having elapsed since the large players in the translation brokering industry transformed the lives and drastically lowered the earning power of freelance translators by imposing technology requirements, there might be freelance translators who, having experienced nothing different, think it is normal to:
- need to use a specific software product to receive translation work,
- need to bid on jobs on a reverse-auction click-work platform in order to get work, which these days might not even be translation work, or
- need to log onto a specific platform and translate a document on that platform, while being monitored by the entity purchasing their efforts on that hamster wheel.
None of the above is at all normal, and all are quite foreign to relationships with direct clients that are translation consumers.
The above are merely requirements imposed on freelance translators by translation-brokering agencies that do nothing more than purchase and resell translation. Because those brokers are now in the process of moving rapidly away from ordering translation from professionals, freelancers need to quickly devise a plan B, and agencies are extremely unlikely to play a part in that plan.
The road forward is not going to be easy, but staying where you are isn’t going to end well, although it certainly will end.
Some more ideas for translators are provided on the parent website.
