So I’m selling my house in the uk so I can use the equity to live comfortably for at least a year to start myself being self-employed.
I plan to focus on Chinese to English translation and private tutoring.
Just wondered if anyone had any advice on how to get started.
Are you sure this is a good idea? Translation’s going the way of the dodo.
Not helpfuL, I know.
Translation’s going the way of the dodo.
You’re right though.
I’m not denying that you’re correct, but can you give me any evidence that that’s the case?
I think there’s always a need for human translations over ai translations.
If it is to English, the need for humans is much less, in our office we use online functions not only to translate but write it better for sales or a topic that the human translator know little about.
Now for Japanese , we pay and think it applies to other non English translations.
A tutor in English, there is a need but now many are from lower cost places so if your from England do not expect good pay. I was in Ireland, but came back to Taiwan for family, and had a pay decrease (but have a nice house here in Kao City) I would think carefully about selling your house in case you do go back like me.
Blimey, 2002 called. It wants its ambition back.
Take it from a 25-year veteran of independent translating from Chinese to English, this business is toast for humans. The crash of 2008 hurt it badly, then the subsequent rise of translation firms in China undercutting American translation agencies dealt it a body blow, and now AI has effectively killed it.
My wife (Taiwanese) and I are back in Canada where we premised the purchase of a house in 2004 (yeah, it’s been that long) on what we’d naively thought was going to be a career on easy street doing something we loved. We’re lucky we got into the property market back when it was reasonably affordable, as we’ve been treading water for a long time now.
The problem with never knowing when your next project is coming is that it’s hard to gauge how the business is trending. Back in the busy days we regularly turned down work, and had to organize our schedules very carefully so as not to get overwhelmed. Now? We sit on our hands for two weeks without a peep, start looking at job listings, then a big job will land in one of our laps. It’s always fool’s gold though, a temporary reprieve from reality, and even those are becoming increasingly scarce.
These days I mostly rank paragraphs of machine translation output to train algorithms. Got work doing that from multiple different clients, it’s all the rage, but it’s not much. My wife and I are also doing some Chinese book cataloguing work for libraries here. Also not much.
The days of getting good at Chinese and launching yourself as a freelancer are long over. Amusing to think that I started doing all this by teaching myself HTML and throwing up a website in 2000. “We want to sell to China” was a common refrain. Eventually I discovered that there were agencies out there subcontracting work to freelancers, so I did a CV blast, and suddenly we had more work than we could handle.
I’m realizing now that the sector of home office-based freelancers was mostly temporal, predicated on the the rise of the internet and the web. I put the Golden Age at 1999 to 2008. Was amazing how much authoritative material universities and patent offices put out there for non-field experts like me to make use of when tackling jobs we didn’t necessarily have the academic background for.
For a short time there, people like my wife and I had it made.
A thread I started in 2004. Happy days!
I still use a Japanese translator for business emails because Japanese is such a nuanced language it’s a minefield and things can go wrong easily. I often using ChatGPT to translate the tranlator’s work back to English to see the difference. By comparison my version comes off as clumsy and self-aggrandizing.
ChatGPT is getting so good now at hitting the right notes though that I probably don’t really need a human translator anymore but I still use her services because she has some interesting insights and suggestions.
I nominate this as a classic post
Translation jobs have essentially disappeared now. 10 years ago it wasn’t great but it wasn’t hard to get high volume work paying at least 1nt per source character (for Chinese to English), how everyone just uses LLM’s and leave it at that, and that you’re not getting much high volume work anymore (if you got more than 30,000 characters, you were lucky). Translation agencies also treat translators poorly, and sometimes find “reasons” to not pay. One translation agency gave unreasonable deadlines nearly all the time.
I think the big hurdle is finding enough work for either (private tutoring or translation), and everything else just falls into place after.
Personally it seems like you get much better stability working minimum wage jobs, which isn’t that bad anymore (like 190nt an hour).
My big issue with LLM is that it often makes subtle errors that you won’t pick up unless you are an expert in whatever you ask it, and that finding them means going over their output with a fine tooth comb. It would end up being more work than just writing from scratch. At least dictionary based translation (like google translate) don’t sound so good that you’d miss subtle errors.