How to stay relevant right now

Before I dive into this week’s topic (How to stay relevant in this very tumultuous moment), I very much recommend Joachim Lépine’s new book on a similar topic: it’s AI Resilient: How freelancers and entrepreneurs can thrive, charge more, and stay irreplaceable in the age of AI. I just finished it and really enjoyed the practical approach. Unlike many books that stay stuck in theory, this one offers real-world advice, including scripts you can use with clients. It’s all about using your human skills as a competitive edge rather than seeing AI as a threat. Plus, the e-book is currently on sale for just 99 cents!

Upcoming class: Direct client marketing launch pad

The T4T “school year” wraps up with a four-week class on the fundamentals of direct client marketing, starting July 7. Direct client marketing launch pad is self-paced, includes weekly Q&A sessions, and costs $250 (American Translators Association members, use coupon code ATA for $30 off) with access to the course materials for six months. You’ll finish with a clear plan to find and market to potential clients. If you’ve been meaning (and meaning and meaning) to get going with some direct client marketing, come join us!

This week’s topic: Ways to stay relevant in these crazy times

Lately, I’ve talked to a lot of freelancers with “relevance anxiety.” If AI can draft an article, translate a document (well or poorly…), or summarize a report in a couple of seconds, it’s easy to stress out: What do clients still need me for? Personally, I’d say: lots of things! But let’s look at some specifics:

• First, your clients might not care about AI at all. You could be stressing over something that’s irrelevant to them. Maybe they don’t care how you do the translation—they just want it done well. Think about how you might feel about your accountant: I pay mine so I don’t have to think about accounting. Does he use tools more advanced than TurboTax? Probably. AI? Maybe. I don’t know or care, I just want my taxes done accurately—and some of my best clients seem to feel the same way about translation: just give us a good result.
• Next, you can stay relevant by doing excellent work for clients who value quality above other factors. It may sound counterintuitive, but many clients are happy to trade some quality for speed or lower cost. Your goal is to find the ones who aren’t. This point is encapsulated in German-English translator Michael Schubert’s recent LinkedIn Article on the value of human translation. I particularly love that Michael leads with, “I’m a technophile,” and proceeds to give examples of how his work beats AI!
• You can also embrace what Ed Gandia calls your “meta-talents.” You should definitely listen to Ed’s latest podcast episode, in which he explores this concept. Ed’s take is that too many freelancers waste energy trying to either a) protect their markets from AI (his view: you can’t—if clients think it works, they’ll use it), or b) outdo AI at its own game. Instead, he says we should treat AI as a complement, not a competitor: “AI excels at narrow, pattern-based tasks. But it lacks judgment, taste, empathy, and original thought. That’s your domain.”
• Yet another option is to focus on work that AI just can’t do. The obstacles might be technical: official documents with handwritten text and tons of stamps and seals, or files that a computer just can’t read. Many of the documents I receive from my law firm clients are a scan of a fax of a photocopy; I can’t even OCR them, much less machine translate them even if I wanted to. The obstacles might also be substantive: I’ve heard from a number of high-level medical and life science translators that AI just isn’t there yet when it comes to those kinds of translations, and I’m sure there are other examples.

Whatever the case, I’ll continue to maintain that you need two things:

1. A diverse business (doing one thing for one type of client is just too risky right now
2. …for clients who care (because the clients who don’t care, have lots of options that are cheaper and faster than you!)

Have a great week!

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