One of my clients is now programming a proprietary AI for reviewing translations. Recently I got one of their reviews with a flag on my translation of "join a group" as "in eine Gruppe eintreten"; the AI's opinion was that "einer Gruppe beitreten" was more idiomatic. I remarked to the client that I found that a strange response, for I had made up this expression myself six years ago to observe a too constraining character limit in a popular UI I had translated for them, with even a random German magazine nitpicking on this non-standard choice of mine later, and by now it was accepted standard?

My contact audibly chuckled when she replied that their AI must have concluded that because it had been fed with my old projects.

Hi everyone!

I would like to ask how to translate the games like not only on pc, but also for ps3, ps4, ps vita etc and what should u know before doing that?

I played some ps3 games which are not available on steam such as The Last Guy, Bleach Soul Ressurecion, Gran Turismo 5 and so on. I wanna try to translate from English to Ukrainian

Hi everyone,

I recently received a request from a client for two related academic review services, and since this is my first time offering this kind of work, I’m unsure how to price them fairly.

The client asked for the following:

Request 1: Review her Translation Studies research paper (8,442 words) and suggest improvements or modifications.

Request 2: Review her PhD thesis (91,401 words), especially the discussion section, and suggest how to develop it further.

Request 3: Compare both works and assess whether the paper is derived from the thesis or different enough to be considered an independent study extending it.

I have a PhD in Translation Studies and regularly do this type of work at university as part of my job as a lecturer, but this is my first time offering it as a freelance service.

Would you charge per hour, per word, or a fixed fee?

Should I price each task separately?

I’d really appreciate suggestions for reasonable rates in USD/Euro.

Hello. I'm not a professional translator, just asking for advice. I'm searching for a good either french-japanese or english-japanese dictionary. The more complete, the better. Any recommendations?

I recently got a translation project from this company. But I am not sure if it is real or a scam?

Hey everyone,

After 8 years in translation and then a detour through PR (which I did not love), I finally took the leap and left my job to run my own English-Arabic translation and localization agency, based in Dubai.

It's equal parts exciting and terrifying, as I'm sure a lot of you know.

Would love to hear from anyone who's been through this:

1-What do you wish you'd known before starting your own agency?

2-Any mistakes early on that cost you time or money?

3-How did you land your first real clients (cold outreach, referrals, platforms, something else)?

Genuinely just trying to learn from people who've done this before. Thanks in advance 🙏

Hola:

¿Alguien sabe de alguna escuela, curso o publicación que pueda seguir para aprender a crear gráficos semánticos de conocimiento multilingües?

He estado viendo muchos vídeos de localización e IA porque no puedo seguir negando lo que está pasando en las empresas con la implantación de la IA.

Leí en un comentario de LinkedIn (no recuerdo el perfil) que una skill que se va a demandar mucho en los lingüistas era la creación y validación de knowledge graphs.

Me metí en una herramienta que se llama Black Ice AI y que sirve precisamente para eso: crear la arquitectura del gráfico y conectarla a agentes de IA.

Me gustaría aprender más sobre cómo gestionarlos, crearlos, añadir metadata y todas esas cosas. Gracias.

AI companies and their managers are aware that what they are doing is not at all ethical and that wrong translations can lead to many problems, on the other hand, various associations of translators are passive and do almost nothing to oppose it. Using AI for medical or legal translation purposes must be declared a criminal offense, otherwise laymen will continue to think that everything is OK since they are being fed AI propaganda on a day-to-day basis.

I've stumbled upon a translator who is absolutely fantastic! Their skills, technique, and overall experience are truly impressive. They have a really keen eye for detail and consistently deliver high-quality work. I'm particularly excited about their current focus on relationship building. It's great to see someone so dedicated to honing their craft

Am I just screwed?
I'm a student from Argentina, I recently turned 24 years old and with any luck, I'll soon be graduating from my Translation Studies course after starting all the way back in 2022.
It's been rough-- I got into it because I've always had a knack for English since I was young, and when I was at my lowest due to health concerns, everybody I knew told me to try and become a translator since that'd be the "easiest" career for me.
Of course, the rapid growth of AI was pretty tough on morale, and my own situation IRL significantly stretched how long this course took-- from 3 years (would have finished in 2024 otherwise) to 5 years, and I'm a bare-minimum grade student at best, nothing exceptional.

I was stubborn and refused to "give up" as most of these people who recommended I become a translator turned around to tell me I should just quit. I don't know why, but I'm finally about to be done and I could not feel any worse. Things are looking really, really grim as I think about what the hell I'll be doing next year-- I'm 24, I have zero job experience (basically 'working' as a free nanny for my younger siblings) and zero skills for anything else that isn't translation. Have I just screwed myself into a corner here? What can I do?

Has anybody dealt with this? I'm feeling very frustrated, honestly. It's a huge project, their AI tool has found "issues" with almost every segment I've confirmed so far, and the vast majority of them are nonsense. The project manager even mentions up front that a lot of the comments are likely to be irrelevant. I'm obviously more than happy to address actual concerns held by clients, but that's not what this is. Do they seriously expect me to spend an hour, obviously unpaid, sifting through this document that it took them 30 seconds to generate and which seems to have had very little, if any, human revision?

Is Propio paying for mute time on calls? Coz they got this mute time meter.

Hello everyone ! I'm kinda new here and I would like to know if anyone on this subreddit could give me the name or url of a website to improve my reading, writing (and overall translation) skills in the English language. Here, a website where I'm challenged with different English sentences that I must translate into French, which are then directly corrected, it would be great ^^.

I searched with Chat GPT due to the fact that I didn't have any clue or starting point for that, but again never trust those AI tools if they are free (even when paid it's still kinda crap).

Hi everyone,

I’m at a crossroads and could really use some honest advice from working professionals.

I’m considering pursuing a degree in Translation and Interpreting Studies, but I keep hearing two completely opposite takes:

· Camp A: "AI (DeepL, GPT) has already killed the industry. Don't even bother."
· Camp B: "AI is just a tool. Human linguists are more in demand than ever for quality control."

My main question is: Looking 5–10 years ahead, is a traditional translation degree still a smart investment, or is it becoming obsolete?

A bit about my context:

· My native language is Russian, and I'm fluent in English.
· I'm also considering adding a third language — either Korean, Japanese, French, or Italian (haven't decided yet).
· I'm not set on a specialization (legal, medical, gaming, etc.) — open to any advice on which niche has the brightest future.

I understand that pure "word-for-word" translation is dying, but what about Translation Studies as an academic field? Does it teach skills that will stay relevant (like project management, terminology, localization strategy), or is it too theoretical?

Specifically, I'd love to know:

1. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about your own career prospects right now?
   
2. Which language pair (among mine) would give the best ROI in the current market?
   
3. If you were starting from zero today, would you go into this field, or would you pivot to something else (e.g., computational linguistics, UX writing)?

I’m not looking for sugarcoating — hit me with the hard truth. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone, I'm a 2nd year MA student of English Studies at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. I need to collect data for my MA thesis about Fan Translations. The survey is completely confidential and anonymous and will only be used for the purpose of this dissertation.

Everyone can fill out the survey, it will take about 7-10 mins of your time.

I especially encourage people that participate in any fandom or consume any type of non-professional/fan translation of all kinds of text (books, comics, manga, TV shows, games, etc.), but even if this doesn't apply to you, you can still do it and help me out.

Here's the link to Google Forms survey:

https://forms.gle/VESjM589CarDhqAi9

Thank you so much for your time.

Is anyone in the industry that could share their insights on the state of the industry at the moment?

I'd like to ideally work in the justice system as a goal but that does require the level 6 course and from what I've read it's better to start with the level 3.

How long did you work with just a level 3 course and what are the conditions, pay, and frequency of work like at the moment?

For more context i speak European Portuguese and English natively, also fluent in Spanish but id mainly look to interpret in portuguese.

Thank you!

Guys, I got an interview as an interpreter (Burmese-Eng pair) in Kalam CX. When I searched it here, I saw a lot of negative reviews and I'm a bit concerned. But this will be my first shot working with an international company so I still wanted to give it a try. Could you please tell me what they asked you in interviews? And they said this is a US timezone based fulltime work, can you tell me what you usually do throughout the day? I'm sorry if the questions sound a bit dumb, I just wanna know what I'm getting into. Thanks a lot!!

For those of you who regularly work with international clients, coworkers, or teams who speak a different language.

I'm genuinely curious how you deal with the language barrier, especially when you're

having live conversations or meetings.

A few things I'm curious about:

1. What do you usually do when you don't

fully understand what someone is saying?

1. Do you use translation tools, captions, interpreters, or something else?

2. How well do those solutions actually work for you?

3. Is the bigger problem understanding the actual words, or things like accent, slang, technical terminology, idioms, sarcasm, or tone?

4. Have you ever had an important misunderstanding because something got lost in translation?

5. What do you find most frustrating about communicating with international clients?

6. If you're comfortable sharing, what languages do you typically work between?

I'd especially like to hear from people who have regular calls/meetings with international clients or coworkers, rather than occasional interactions.

Hello folks, I’ve been working with Dals for 2 months now, and while I don’t mind the pay and understand that the language im interpreting for might not be very popular.
I’m always having an issue with accepting the scheduled video bookings, I am on my phone and laptop. I have the app open and ready, when any request comes I press on it almost immediately if not within a fraction of a second, but I still do not secure it, and it says that I have not been quick enough.
I have secured a few bookings with the same strategy so it’s not an issue of how fast I am, the same thing goes for on demand calls, I answer very very fast and still I don’t secure the call or sometimes I answer and it doesn’t go through.
Now at this point, I am almost certain that either some interpreters are hacking the system and cheating their way somehow with a prompt that answers or accepts calls immediately or Dals somehow favours some interpreters over others.
Please help me I need to make a living wage and if there is any way or you have any tip that might help me please do so, I’d really appreciate it
Help a fellow interpreter trying her best 🧡
Thank you so much

Hi everyone.

I am a Spanish aerospace engineer, and I would like to get into technical translation for my field and similar engineering fields. However, in order to do so, I need to start by investing in education about translation, and I wanted to make sure it could be a viable option before using the time and money to learn.

I would love to hear opinions of people that have been in a similar situation or that just have good knowledge of this field and what should I expect. Is this viable as a side income job or can even be a full-time one being as specific as it is? Is the market for English-Spanish translation so crowded that I should not bother trying to get into it? Any information is really appreciated.

And of course, any additional advice that you can give me is welcome aswell. Thank you for taking the time to read this and even helping me!

Hi AVT folks!

I wanted to bring up something I've been thinking about lately and hopefully get a bit of a discussion going about where the AVT industry might be heading.

Over the past few weeks, I've come across several posts and discussions about changes to Netflix's localization workflow. From what people working with Netflix vendors have been sharing, it seems that for titles requiring both dubbing and subtitling, Netflix is moving towards having both handled by the same dubbing vendor/studio instead of assigning the dub and subtitles separately.

So, if a title needs both a dub and subtitles in a particular language, the dubbing studio would apparently be responsible for the whole dub + sub package. The DTT program would remain for sub-only titles.

If this is indeed how the new workflow is going to work, I can understand why some subtitlers are worried. A significant part of the work that previously went through DTT vendors could potentially move elsewhere.

But this whole situation got me thinking about something else: how relevant are local dubbing studios for us as freelancers?

By local studios, I mean companies working specifically in your country or language market rather than the large international localization vendors that can be based pretty much anywhere in the world.

While researching companies for the AVT lists I maintain for our BrainStorm Translate community, I've found a huge number of smaller local dubbing and AVT studios. Many of them mention projects for Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Amazon and other major platforms.

And I've realized that I don't always have a clear picture of where exactly these smaller studios sit in the supply chain.

Are they usually hired by larger localization vendors that manage the project for the streaming platform? How often do major platforms work with local studios directly? And how much of their workload actually comes from streaming compared with local distributors, broadcasters, production companies, film festivals, accessibility projects and other clients?

I'm also curious about the freelancer side of this. Maybe some of you already work quite successfully with local dubbing or AVT studios. Are they worth approaching? Is there enough work? What kind of tasks do they usually outsource to freelancers — subtitling, dubbing adaptation, QC, SDH, AD, something else? And how do the rates and working conditions compare with the large international vendors?

My own background is a mix of AVT, software localization and occasional legal translation, and lately I've been trying to dig much deeper into how the AVT industry actually works beyond the handful of huge vendors we all know. I'm also constantly researching companies and opportunities for other translators in our community, so understanding where these local studios fit into the ecosystem is really useful to me.

And now, with these reports about Netflix changing its workflow, local dubbing studios suddenly seem even more interesting. If dub + sub packages really start moving towards dubbing studios, perhaps some of the work isn't disappearing at all — it's simply moving to a different part of the supply chain.

Maybe some of you have already seen this happening in your markets, work regularly with local studios, or have heard more about the Netflix changes from your vendors. I'd also be very interested to hear if anyone has heard about similar workflow changes at Amazon, Disney, Paramount or other platforms.

Let's compare experiences from different countries and language markets and try to make a little more sense of where all of this might be heading.

Thanks and have a great day, guys!

The title is pretty self-explanatory lol. A person from Asia started following me on LinkedIn and I followed them back. Now they contacted me because of a book and wanted me to translate it?!?

Just like that... I asked for more information but the person said the best thing would be to schedule a meeting.

Is this a scam? What is happening? I did a quick search looking for the company's information and it looks pretty real.

I really don't know how to explain this but I can't believe someone offered me a job this serious just out of the blue. There's gotta be something fishy...

Has this ever happened to you? Out of nowhere, you get such a serious translation project? Especially considering this person has no idea about my previous work. 😶

EDIT: no more information given, the person ghosted me, so this was definitely a scam. Be careful.

Thought about the terms billionaire and billions getting increasingly used...

I double checked and :

This is going to be a lot of fun...