The Future of freelance translation

Language services are widely employed across diverse sectors, including legal, medical, IT and telecommunication, education, automotive...

The global language services market size reached US$ 67.2 Billion in 2022. Looking forward, and it is expected to reach US$ 98.6 Billion by 2028, exhibiting a growth rate of 6.2% during 2023-2028.

Many long-time freelance translators, however, don’t seem to be benefitting from this growth, particularly those who don’t work with a lot of direct clients. Many report they’ve had to lower their rates and work more hours to maintain their inflation-adjusted earnings.

Namely, if the demand for translation is increasing, along with opportunities for people with advanced language skills, why are many professional freelance translators having difficulty finding work that compensates translation for what it is?

The fact is, no matter how much improvement we see with Machine Translation tools, most corporations will continue to use real translators. Why is this?

Let’s skip the fact that Machine Translation tools such as Google Translate and other tools still makes plenty of mistakes! which you absolutely cannot afford to have in legal contracts, financial statements and the like.

my point of view is, even highly skilled and experienced translators will increasingly have to change their work methods and accepting to work with machine translation systems which, however much we want to deny it, are getting more and more effective.

because it will fairly soon become the bulk of our work, and we need to get used to it. We need to make it clear to the public that good translation has become, not just a process monopolized by humans, but a partnership between machine translation and people who know how to work with it.

The future of freelance translation will remain highly demanded with the concentration on the ongoing volume of international business that is growing lager each minute!

The winners will be those translators who can leverage their specialist linguistic skills by increasing their productivity with advances in technology. and their chances at succeeding financially in the long term is actually thriving. So, if you’re reading this article, things have already started to change!