When and how to pursue a new niche in your business

Lately, I’ve gotten multiple versions of a similar question from readers and students:

• “I feel like ‘pure translation’ may be fading away, or at least the translation world is really changing”
• “And I’d like to perhaps pursue a new niche”
• “But I’m not sure how to go about it. Should I go back to school, work for free, try a bunch of different things, or something else?”

It’s a huge topic, but let’s take a stab at it!

Is pure translation fading away?

This is a huge and complicated question, because it depends on how you define “pure translation” and who you work for. But I do agree that the work that was the backbone of the industry when I started out in 2002: high-volume translation for mid-market agencies, paid at a decent per-word rate (which I would define as 12 cents per word or more; I don’t work for less than 15 cents), is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, or at least a lot less common. Many or even most mid-market agencies have moved to machine translation + post-editing (MTPE) wherever it’s feasible (meaning that a computer can read the files and produce a translation that is good enough to be cleaned up by a human). Most agency employees I talk to say that this is for a simple reason: the bulk of their clients seem happy with the results of this process, and are very focused on price and speed. That, in and of itself, is another huge topic: does this mean that the new “quality standard” in translation is, “If the client doesn’t complain, the translation was fine”? That may merit its own newsletter, and there are certainly languages and specializations where MT is still relatively useless, and there are highly visible projects like marketing campaigns, annual reports, website copy, etc. that really have to be perfect. But in general, we seem to be in an era where “good enough is good enough” for many translation clients.

Is this true in my business?

For what it’s worth, my translation work is pretty much holding steady (no major increase, no major decrease), for a few reasons:

• I hit the rates wall with most agencies a long time ago, before the AI wall was an issue. I’ve really never worked for less than 14-15 cents per word, which priced me out of the French to English agency market starting probably six or seven years ago.
• I was never a heavy translation technology user, and thus I’ve always worked with clients who weren’t super technology-focused. I’ve used Trados for probably 15 years, but TM was never my favorite way to work, and MT even less so, which resulted in a base of clients who aren’t that concerned with technology.

What’s growing? What niches might you want to pursue?

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are exceptions all over the place. But, here are some general categories of freelancers in the language professions that I see doing well right now:

• Anyone who works in a specialization that AI can’t handle. This is a huge range: I think that books are too nuanced, official documents are too hard to read, and topics like medical research or scientific journal articles are too complicated. There’s really no over-arching rule that defines what MT can handle and what it can’t, but there are a lot of areas that it can’t!
• High-end editors. Here I’m not talking about post-editing machine translation for $25 an hour. I’m talking about clients who want to (maybe) save some time by starting with an MT draft that is then polished by a really good editor, or writers whose language skills are good enough that they don’t need a translator, but they need a really good editor. Here I’m talking about people charging probably $75-$150 an hour.
• Audiovisual translators. Weirdly enough, I know a lot of subtitlers and transcriptionists who are doing quite well. I say “weirdly enough,” because I think a lot of people assume that a/v will be completely absorbed by AI, but honestly that doesn’t seem to be the case so far.
• People who work with direct clients who want the job done by hand. This is most of my direct clients, and all of my law firm clients. They use very little technology themselves, so they’re not interested in a technology-leveraged translation process. I know that it’s the opposite situation with many large law firms that have jumped 100% on the DeepL bandwagon, but my law firm clients (mostly one or two attorneys working for themselves) are totally not interested in MT.
• Specialized writers and copywriters. Copywriting and content marketing writing has been hit hard by AI, in similar ways to translation. Google’s new AI mode, otherwise known as “Google does the googling for you” is, or will soon be, a huge hit to online content creators, whereby if you search “yoga poses for back pain,” you’ll simply get an AI-generated summary, rather than links to yoga content websites. And yet, this creates a ton of new opportunities for highly specialized writers to write things like e-mail newsletters that are sent directly to subscribers. I’m really, really glad that I’ve put a lot of effort into growing and maintaining my e-mail list, so that I can send you human-written, (hopefully) relevant content, straight to your inbox. Lots of businesses need writers to do that kind of thing, or they need writers who specialize in annual reports, or sustainability reports, or academic journal articles, or making blog posts into infographics (and on and on).
• Interpreters. It’s just true! As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I think that fully automated interpreting will exist someday, and I think we’re seeing more clients patching together some workarounds. I gave an example of how I lost an interpreting client who decided to start using MT-generated captions on their videos (IMO a bad idea, but they went ahead with it!). But in general, I think most interpreters are doing quite well, in terms of rates and volume. I recently acquired two new interpreting clients, and both of them offered to pay more than what I asked for (and right, I’m the one who’s always talking about asking for more money!).

So, then what?

If you’d like to pursue a new niche, you have a few options.

• You could go back to school. When I decided to pursue interpreting in a serious way, I knew that I would never have the confidence to work for high-level clients unless I did a Master’s in conference interpreting, so that’s what I did, and it was 100% worth it.
• You could pursue training that’s not a university-based program. There are lots of entities like HubSpot Academy, the Editorial Freelancers Association, ACES, the Society for Technical Communication, Ooona, Copyblogger and many others that offer online and in-person training in “adjacent” fields that might be of interest to translators (those are not endorsements, just examples!).
• You could try the “old clients, new service” approach. It’s always hard to determine when you’re ready to offer a new service, but you’re much more likely to succeed in a new service with a client who already trusts you. If you want to try ghostwriting, you could propose writing some white papers for the CEO of a client you already translate for. If you want to try content writing, maybe some of your existing clients have newsletters but they’re not great, or they should have a newsletter but they don’t. Maybe you translate for a non-profit that needs a grant writer. New services for existing clients are a good place to start.
• You could do pro bono work. I have mixed feelings about working for free, but I think that offering free services where you’re helping a worthy organization and gaining experience in a niche you want to pursue, is an OK idea. The first key is to place some limits on what you’re offering: “I’d like to write your newsletter for three months,” “I’d like to rework the text on your Home and About pages,” “I’d like to write five blog posts for you.” The other key is to get as much benefit as possible for yourself: ask the pro bono client for a LinkedIn recommendation; ask them to put your name on everything you work on for them (“French version of our newsletter created by Julie Roy”), ask if you can use them as a reference.
• You could work for low pay, on a short-term basis. This is obviously a horrible long-term idea. If you look for low-paying work, there’s a ton of it out there, and you’ll soon be burnt out and miserable! But it’s not the worst way to test the waters of a new niche. Years ago, I thought I wanted to do more blog writing, so I did a few projects on Upwork. There are tons of online trainings on how to do this, but bidding on jobs on Upwork means that the work is right there, you’re not sending out cold e-mails, and it’s generally low-commitment: someone who wants one or two blog posts. The client reviews your services on Upwork so you have a nice testimonial right there; I wouldn’t get stuck there forever, and I would personally never work for less than around $40 an hour, even “just for the experience,” but it’s an option. I burned out on this pretty quickly because most clients wanted someone to generate a massive flow of traffic from three blog posts, but it was an interesting experience.
• You could try to get a referral to a high-end client. Most of us are terrified to use our personal networks to help us find clients. And yet, we all have “that” friend, or even more than one of them! That friend who used to work for a Senator and has tons of political connections; that friend whose spouse is a partner in a really successful law firm; that friend who just sold their startup for a gazillion dollars; that friend who was employee number six at a company that’s now trading at a gazillion dollars a share. You’d be surprised at what a referral from someone like that can do for you, and how few questions the person they’re referring you will ask. This is sort of the opposite of the Upwork strategy: just aim for the $200 an hour clients right out of the gate, and it’s sometimes easier than the more crowded markets.

If you’re thinking about if or how to pursue a new niche, I hope that these tips are helpful! It’s kind of a weird time in the freelance translation and interpreting world; feel free to comment below if you have anything you’d like to add.