Musings from an Underemployed Translator July 29, 2023
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings, Uncategorized.trackback
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!
Musings from an overworked translator 
I know how that feels… I hope it gets better soon.
Hi Jill, I feel your pain… something similar has happened to me, so I now do mostly translations of civil registry and other documents for clients who are seeking Italian citizenship, or transcripts/diplomas for students or professionals seeking to study or work in Italy or here in the States, in addition to guiding them (for a fee) through the cumbersome process. I also do some genealogical research for the same clients (I took some online course at the Genealogical Society). It is easy work I can do with my eyes closed. Book translations dried up a few years ago as publishers were still offering the same rates of ten years ago. I have two small agencies left that still send me some work. Large law firms and financial institutions have forgotten me…. But, during COVID I started taking Zoom classes to polish my knowledge of Latin and now have work from that language, which is not dead, believe it or not! Good luck to you, may St. Jerome the patron of translators inspire you to fruitfully diversify! If Germany has a double citizenship treaty with the U.S. maybe you can explore that avenue and contact the German Consulate in your city.
I gave up on machine translation and “post-editing” a long time ago and am very happy for it! I don’t need to play stupid mind-games with machines. Most of my clients now are private individuals or small law firms. I still work for the State Dept. but am thinking of quitting if they keep changing all the security systems every six months making it difficult for a computer troglodyte like me to keep pace.