Musings from an overworked translator

Musings from an Underemployed Translator July 29, 2023

I’m thinking about renaming this blog Musings from an Underemployed Translator. Machine translation, artificial intelligence, and T&I industry mergers and acquisitions have left me with no work. The rose-colored predictions forecasted highly specialized translators would not be affected, but I am not the only translator at the top of my specialization who has noticed a huge drop in work. Two experts who have actually written dictionaries in their field are also reporting an alarming drop in work. Can it be blamed entirely on MT and AI? Has COVID played a role – or the weak German economy? It’s hard to say. But the fact remains that I am revising my resume and looking for work. I will not be attending the ATA conference this year, because I haven’t had any income in three months.

I have been fighting this for as long as I can. I have marketed my butt off for several years. I started pushing my specialization (medical translation). I thought medical would be a good choice because of data privacy and HIPAA. Turns out many clients don’t care. I started a “second job” as a Zoom producer, but there aren’t a lot of classes offered in the summer months. I picked up a new skill this year when I attended a two-week course to learn old German script at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in June. I can now read and transcribe the fancy Kurrent and Gothic writing from the 1700s and 1800s. The course was a blast, and I went from not even knowing if the document I brought with me was written in German to being able to sight read it toward the end of the second week. And I transcribed 44 lines of text in 45 minutes with only a few mistakes for our “final.” I sent out an email to my clients informing them of my new skill and got a one-off, 1-page job from one of them. But then, once again, crickets…

The fact remains that I need to earn money to pay rent and bills and buy food for my cat and me. If you are or know of an agency or direct client who could use my services, please send me an email. If you have ever learned or benefited from this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee as a thank you. In the meantime, I will continue to look for a job and if it isn’t in the T&I industry, this blog will go away. It’s been a good run!