Existential dread about the language professions: how to cope

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• You can still sign up for Thursday’s master class on Translating official documents from French to English (apologies, I originally announced this for the wrong date!). This class covers the translation technique and business aspects of translating official documents. Registration is $75 and includes the recording. 
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This week’s topic: Coping with existential dread about the language professions

I’ve recently fielded questions from numerous freelancers who are feeling existential dread about the language professions. These questions come primarily from people who are exclusively translators (they don’t interpret, subtitle, edit, etc.) and they center around a few key themes.

A typical message goes like this: “My business is actually doing fine, but all of the talk about AI replacing us is getting me down. I’ve talked to a few other freelancers who have lost so much work that they’re thinking about looking for another job. And every time I sense some hesitancy on the part of a client, or I have a slow week, I feel like it’s the end of my career. What should I do, besides maybe just staying off social media?” 

My thoughts on the source of the dread 

I have lots of thoughts on this topic, some of which I wrote about my previous article, Q1 2025: The best of times, the worst of times. While things are going well in my business, I agree with the people who’ve commented on the emotional toll of the swirling doom and gloom about the language professions right now. And the doom and gloom isn’t just rumor: I’ve recently talked to freelancers who are working side jobs to pay their bills, or who are dipping into savings for the first time in 15+ years of freelancing due to lack of work. 

I see a few contributing factors:

• AI fever, compounded by our tendency to focus on examples of people actually losing work to AI, of which there are plenty
• The unsettled US and world economies in general
• The ongoing world events (war in Ukraine, war in Gaza) affecting specific languages and clients
• The massive cuts to the US Federal government, including the near-elimination of the US Agency for International Development
• Fear of what might come next: Could the US’s longstanding language access laws be next on the chopping block? Could machine interpreting suddenly make a “great leap forward,” the way translation did with the advent of ChatGPT? It’s a lot to consider. 

Multiple things are true at once

I really think this is one of those situations where multiple things can be, and are, true at the same time. The operative word here is “and.” There’s still a lot of good language work out there, *and* it’s more time-consuming than it used to be, to find that work. Many people in the language professions are doing really well, *and* I think we’re going to lose a lot of people from the language professions, especially “pure” translators who either don’t have the skills or don’t have the desire to work with direct clients. 

That being said, I have yet to talk to someone who is doing a lot of targeted marketing and not finding work. Everyone I know who is doing a lot of targeted marketing, is finding work. And by “a lot,” I mean that they’re either sending out more than 100 highly targeted e-mails, or they’re attending multiple client-side conferences. 

A final consideration: Every single knowledge profession in the world is being affected by these same factors. According to an article I just read in Forbes (it’s paywalled, but you can probably find snippets online), 65% of law firms agree with the statement, “AI will separate successful law firms from unsuccessful ones within the next five years.” We (the knowledge professions) are literally all in this together, and I think the only way “out,” if that’s what you’re looking for, is to do a job that cannot be done on a computer. 

What now?

Here’s how I’m coping:

• Acknowledge that it’s scary. Just as when someone you know has a seemingly out-of-nowhere health crisis, it’s impossible to read this stuff (“My 15-year business has basically evaporated in the last year”) without wondering if it could happen to you. 
• And, acknowledge that someone else’s reality is not your reality. I couldn’t help myself, I actually asked ChatGPT if we’re going to be eliminated, and even it says no! You need to focus on what’s happening in *your* business, not in anyone else’s business.

That being said, I think we all need to:

• Be prepared to lose a large amount of work overnight. Envision a scenario in which your largest client drops you with no notice, and think about what you’d do. My defense against that is a sizable emergency fund, and some back-burner marketing ideas that are totally different from what I’m doing now. Your defense will be different, but you need to have one. 
• Take action; don’t sit there waiting for something awful to happen. Get ahead of it. In this economy, I think you’re never going to have just the right amount of work. It’s always going to be slightly too much or slightly too little. If you’d rather have slightly too much, market consistently until you have a little more work than you want, because if you stop when you have just enough work, you’re back on the hamster wheel if you lose one client. 
• Consider hiring a virtual assistant to help you with marketing. I stopped actively marketing to translation agencies around five years ago; few enough of them will pay my rates that it just was not worthwhile. And the truth is that marketing to direct clients is a lot of work. I’ve recently talked to a couple of freelancers who are using virtual assistants for the tedious part: they (the freelancers) make a list of 10-20 companies/universities/NGOs/other entities that they want to market to, then they write a template for e-mails and LinkedIn messages, then the virtual assistant (who has to be someone you really trust) locates those entities’ employees who are most likely to need the freelancer’s services, and contacts them by e-mail, LinkedIn, or both. I’ve never done this, but if you’re aiming to consistently contact 10+ clients per week, I think it’s worth considering. 
• Finally, think worst-case scenario and ask yourself if the worst-case scenario would really be that bad. Again, everyone’s is going to be different, but here’s mine. My husband’s job is tenuous right now because he works at a government climate research lab. I earn more in cash than he does, but we get all of our benefits through his job, and our young adult daughter is still a full-time student, so she’s still on our health insurance. Let’s say that my husband got laid off and I lost more than one major client. Here’s my thought: we live in an expensive city, our house is paid off, and we have no other debt. Worst case scenario, we could rent our house out and move to a part of the world with a very low cost of living (Thailand? Philippines? Indonesia?), put my daughter on her school’s student health insurance, and give ourselves six months to a year to figure things out. And in reality, that doesn’t sound horrible. Maybe your scenario is different, but personally it helps me to think about what I would do if the economy really collapsed. 

Finally, whatever happens, we’re in it together! I’m glad to have you as part of the Training for Translators community!