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.

[image] ninman: 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. N…

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 d…

A thread I started in 2004. Happy days! [image] Translator roll call Learning Chinese I’ve come across various threads in which posters mention that they do translation, and that got me curious. So I came up with a list of questions that I thought would be interesting. I…

[image] PeiHua-Connie: Now for Japanese , we pay and think it applies to other non English translations. 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 tr…

[image] rousseau2: Blimey, 2002 called. It wants its ambition back. 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 (…

Becoming a self-employed translator and English tutor

Work Working in Taiwan

rousseau2 September 7, 2025, 6:38pm 7

A thread I started in 2004. Happy days!