Who’s doing well as a freelancer these days?

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This week, let’s talk about who’s doing well as a freelance translator or interpreter, these days. We hear a lot of doom and gloom about the language professions, some of it warranted, and some of it unwarranted. Not that I know every freelance translator or interpreter on earth (I definitely do not), but I do talk to a lot of people in our professions, so here’s my take on what types of translators and interpreters are making good money and doing interesting work. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s my take, and it may provide some inspiration if you’re looking for more work, more interesting work, or better-paying work:

1. Freelancers with loyal clients whose main concern is not price. In my mind, this is probably the best “job security” that exists for freelancers. You have clients who know (at least in a vague sense) that they could find someone cheaper or faster, but they continue working with you because other factors are more important to them. Hopefully they value the quality of your work; they probably also value confidentiality, responsiveness, the fact that you know their requirements, and that you carve out time for them when they really need you. A successful freelancer recently commented to me, “I have a good direct client who sends me a document with a one-sentence e-mail, like, ‘We need this as soon as you can get to it.’ We don’t have to discuss price, or formatting, or terminology, because we’ve already hashed those things out. The last thing they want to do is call an agency project manager they’ve never worked with before, and have to start from scratch, even if it would be cheaper.”
2. Freelancers with “captive audience” clients. By this I mean, clients who have to use you, whether or not they really want to. Examples of this include court systems that are required or at least strongly encouraged to use court-certified interpreters; individuals who have to use an ATA-certified translator for their official documents; interpreting clients who work in a market (i.e. Canada) where they are legally required to provide interpreting. I do some of this type of work myself, and I think it’s a factor to consider if you’re thinking about a new service offering. The downside of “captive audience” clients is that they sometimes don’t appreciate your work, or even make it totally clear that they’re only using you because they have to. But having clients who have no choice except to use your services isn’t the worst thing in the world. I honestly kind of feel that way about my accounting firm: I like them as people, I would be thrilled to spend the money I pay them on something else if there were another option, but there really isn’t, because I don’t want to do my own taxes.
3. Freelancers who have followed the money to a specific niche. I feel like this is becoming more common as AI and MT hollow out the middle of the translation market, which is where most freelancers want(ed) to work. I’ve talked to freelance translators who have started providing highly specialized copywriting services to the types of clients they translate for, at good rates. I’ve talked to interpreters who have started providing translate/transcribe services to law firms with high confidentiality needs. I’ve talked to subtitlers who are doing high-end corporate video subtitling work, in addition to their regular subtitling jobs. The key here is to focus on the intersection between what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, and what clients have the budget to pay well for.
4. Freelancers who do one specific thing, very well. We talk a lot about diversification, and how it can be a really good thing in a freelance business. Diversification has really helped me; my business is basically a triathlon (translation, interpreting, teaching/writing/consulting), which I enjoy and which I think has been a significant business advantage. However, the same is true of narrowing down and doing only one, very specialized thing, whether that’s translating for German-speaking doctors who want to get their work published in American or British scientific journals, or translating audio guide scripts for museums and then recording the voiceover, or translating thriller novels, basically becoming “the” person for a very narrow specialization.
5. Beginning freelancers who are creative and persistent. I think that starting out as a freelancer in 2024 is not necessarily harder than it used to be, but it demands a more creative and persistent approach. When I started out in 2002, things were a lot more straightforward: most people started out by translating for large agencies that hired anyone who passed their tests, then moved up to more discerning agencies and maybe direct clients. Today, you could still take that approach, but you’re likely to spend the bulk of your time editing machine-translated texts. That’s not objectively bad or wrong, but it’s a lot different than starting out as a pure translator. The beginning freelancers I talk to who are making decent money and enjoying the work have two qualities in common: they are creative, and they are persistent. They accept that they have to do a lot of marketing, whereas mid-career freelancers are more likely to express frustration at that (“I want to be a translator, not a translation salesperson”). They might be pursuing a certificate or graduate degree in an area they’d like to specialize in (genealogy, forensic linguistics, paralegal) because they know that specialization is the way to go. I think that successful beginners are also more likely to experiment and see what sticks: “I started offering tours of my city in Spanish on AirBnB experiences;” “I volunteered for TED Translators and found out I love subtitling;” “I sent out postcards to 200 immigration law firms offering certified document translation services.”

As I said above, this is totally unscientific, but these are some trends I’ve been thinking about, and I hope they are helpful to you!