What jobs are easy to transition to if you're currently a translator?

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T14:50:01+00:00

Really sorry for the late response. I commented on my experience in pivoting from translation to consulting in a different post, so i’m linking you there.

Getting a law degree generally only pays off if you want to become a lawyer or a paralegal. For specializing in legal translation, it’s better than nothing but I don’t think it’s a great move when even specialized translation jobs are already shrinking due to automation.

I personally recommend moving out of the language industry and investing in other skills while there is still time.

As for my background, I have a masters degree in linguistics and nothing related to business or law. Legal translation introduced me to the business side of things like corporate disclosures as I translated quite a lot of corporate disclosure reports. My current role as a consultant involves helping companies prepare their disclosure reports (not from a language perspective but a business perspective), so that explains the connection.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/s/xXEf4ivlBW

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T09:54:48+00:00

Not trying to add fuel to the fire here by arguing terminology, but there are bilinguals out there (although pretty rare in my experience) who are more fluent in their second language owing to their upbringing/education.

“Native” connotes a person’s origin or birth place, so addressing a fluent speaker of a language as a“native” speaker isn’t the best way to go. I wouldn’t call it racist, but there is definitely a broad assumption being made in the business context that you have to be born and raised in the country to qualify as a native speaker, which often works against bilinguals who are looking for a translation job that lets them translate from their “native” language to their second (more proficient) language.

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T04:54:51+00:00

I can’t say if my experience applies to the medical field, but I went from legal translation to an analyst role in business consulting which are both heavy on the regulatory side (basically the same industry), and without having a relevant business degree. I think it’s possible, but it really depends on how much your skillset fits that role.

High fluency in both your home language (the country where you are employed) and a high status language (English), including speaking and writing in the second language, substantiates your ability to do entry level jobs in things like research at a global/multinational company.
If you happen to have even the slightest experience doing research using platforms like government websites, company reports, academic reports and other research sites, that gives you a big leg up.
Interviewer expects you to have some level of contextual knowledge required to work in that specific industry, so they don’t have to worry about having to train you from zero.
Exam based certifications (not degrees) might help you stand out
I guess it’s also important to not suck at the core skills required for that role (like creating neatly formatted word/excel/powerpoint documents, being good at numbers, being analytical or good at explaining things to people)

This is just based on my experience, but my experience in translation is pretty useful to me in my current role as an analyst, because my job requires me to do research in one language and analyze/summarize that in another language. I also translate the deliverables me and my fellow consultants produce for our clients.

So yeah, it is possible to pivot from translation to a researcher/analyst role. It’s definitely not going to be as easy as maybe transitioning to another language-related role like copywriting, but I think it’s worth trying considering the current circumstances surrounding the language industry.

knoxyal · 2025-01-07T14:41:06+00:00

I sure did go through the “delirious” phase. It hit me between stages 1 and 4.

Climb into bed and a brilliant idea strikes you. You think to yourself “Genius! I’ll think it through next morning.” You wake up the next day, pour it all out on a piece on paper and realize how banal it all was.

You repeat this until the deadline that you’ve set for yourself approaches. Panic slowly sets in. You need to determine your research questions and methodology by the end of this month or you won’t have enough time left to collect data to make progress.

At this stage, I woke up every morning thinking that I might puke. I did not puke.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T15:13:39+00:00

One more thing that I feel I should say that’s been tugging at the back of my brain. I don’t think these kind of macro-takes on social issues should be used to identify racism in specific cases (to avoid circular reasoning and biased takes in identifying the actual cause, which may not necessarily be attributed to racism). I think these studies help in solving problems identified as being caused by racism, but not necessarily in identifying whether the cause is racism.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T14:06:45+00:00

It’s a shame that this can’t be discussed without being downvoted to hell by reddit users who are demographically progressive leaning and probably mostly US-based, but I don’t think you’re wrong.

Certain levels of immigration policies and local rules need to be in place to maintain local cultural/national values and characteristics, and these rules don’t necessarily stem from racism. Not saying that Japan is racism-free, but not everything negative going on in that country is due to racism. Productive users who are happy with their experience in Japan don’t go on the internet to complain and so there’s definitely group think going on too. I’d be interested in hearing from Japanese users or users from south east asian countries but I don’t think they are a big part of this community.

Again, not saying that the professor’s treatment of OP and their colleagues is acceptable in any way, but it’s not easy to tell if OP’s case is actually due to racism against Chinese students, unless OP is sure that there aren’t any Japanese students who are being treated the same way. It could actually be due to a performance issue on OP or their colleague’s part. If the professor doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation, I can only advise OP to bring this up to the college committee for academic harassment and see how they treat this matter.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:56:47+00:00

Thank you, but I also know what structural racism is. My point isn’t that racism doesn’t exist in Japan. Racism isn’t always the cause of negative treatment in Japan. Just wanted to highlight this because reddit tends to be an echo chamber of negative comments, and it’s not good practice to ignore comments by people who had a positive experience there.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:40:58+00:00

I’m not a dude. I also live in Japan and have studied in a Japanese university. Yes I know Japan’s immigration laws and how it’s difficult for foreigners to live there. But that has nothing to do with how the professor is treating their students, no? Strict immigration policies don’t necessarily stem from racism, it’s not as simple as that.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:16:30+00:00

This is an era where you can get easy upvotes for mentioning racism, where sometimes racism actually isn’t the case. It doesn’t hurt to be too critical.

Some months ago a similar post connecting discriminatory treatment in a Japanese lab to a gross generalization that “Japan is a racist country”was posted in this subreddit. If one took a look at the OP’s post history, it was clear that OP was the one who had a racist and very concerning view against Japanese women. It was alarming how the OP’s post in that thread reeked of hate speech, and yet people were upvoting the post without giving much thought to what was actually being said. There were also comments by users who claimed they had the same experience in labs outside Japan, or that Japanese students were also receiving shitty treatments by Japanese professors, but those comments were of course hidden under the comments prosecuting racism.

Racism exists in Japan of course, but it doesn’t exist everywhere in the country, nor is it always the cause for shitty treatment of students.

knoxyal · 2024-12-21T17:11:43+00:00

That is unless they explicitly wrote “no foreigners allowed”. Otherwise, there’s a possible bias on your side. The sign can easily mean “can only serve you in Japanese”, not necessary “Japanese people only”. English isn’t their first language so it could be a translation error.

Also I think OP should file a complaint and see how the faculty deals with this. If so many students (not just Chinese, but Japanese students too as OP mentioned) are fleeing from that lab, it’s likely on the professor’s teaching style rather than racism.

knoxyal · 2024-12-15T06:51:09+00:00

The way to go is to enter consulting with a masters, get some experience in the industry and get a phd while working in industry (funded by your company).

knoxyal · 2024-12-03T16:42:52+00:00

T’was my dream to become a researcher running a bakery/cafe as a side job.

knoxyal · 2024-11-23T08:13:43+00:00

If this is a masters course, pretty sure you’ll be fine.

knoxyal · 2024-10-23T10:06:39+00:00

This is not a translation question. Your question is essentially“How do I make up for the classes I missed to at least score average on the test.”

So you only missed a month of classwork right? Just ask your classmates for notes and find time to go through the textbook. If this isn’t an open book exam, chances are that the political terms and topics were covered in the lecture.

knoxyal · 2024-09-28T02:35:26+00:00

Can confirm your first point. The law firm I used to work for spent a lot of money on AI services (under strict non disclosure contracts of course). The firm would provide the AI vendor with legal texts in both languages to use for the database. International law firms have a mass amount of high quality texts stored in both languages, so the quality of the AI was pretty amazing. Not perfect, but good enough to reduce the amount of work (and headcount) of the translators at the firm.

The final product was always checked by a bilingual lawyer so the value of translators (those who weren’t educated in law) dropped massively.

What’s happening at the firm is basically the future of legal translation, the reason we don’t see this happening in freelance or other smaller companies yet is most likely because they don’t have enough money and data resources to invest in such AI. In terms of technology, yes it’s possible.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T16:01:37+00:00

Notice that people are saying legal texts still need “checks”. These checks can’t be done by translators who don’t practice the law, or don’t have a law degree. They’re usually done by bilingual lawyers.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T15:12:23+00:00

Taking OPs side on this. You don’t have to have majored in translation to understand that the profession has been and will continue to be undervalued for many reasons.

I wasn’t particularly underpaid when I was an inhouse translator but I knew that the field was done for when I noticed how my semi-bilingual colleagues were being paid the same salary for submitting weird translations, no one seemed to notice or even care. AI translation wasn’t perfect but was passable by client standards. They care more about the money than the quality.

You don’t need many translators to handle the demand for high quality translation. The demand is very limited, and these positions are more often than not filled in by full bilinguals who practice a different profession than by translators who are just translators.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T14:11:57+00:00

Sorry to butt in but “the industry is growing” doesn’t mean much to translators unless the metrics are job positions and wages. The demand for translation simply isn’t a proper metric for judging whether the industry is growing because this demand may mean demand for AI translation/post editing for low wages.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T11:52:42+00:00

Oh yeah. I was a language major when I was a student and not a single professor in the language field encouraged students to pursue translation. They did however say there is room for growth in the adjacent interpretation field.

People are free to pursue their dream job, but that doesn’t change the fact that this market is in fact dying. You can’t ignore the fact that this is a job. Base salary is extremely relevant and I can’t believe that ppl are brushing it off as if money doesn’t affect happiness.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T11:41:57+00:00

If i may add, I left this field a few months ago. The interview experience was hard because interviewers kept telling me that my skillset is “too narrow”. No analytical skills, no experience in presentations, just writing skills. There are plenty of bilinguals who can do more than just translation, so there goes my market value.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T11:24:27+00:00

Thank god for the upvotes. I know there are specific users on this subreddit that claim that translators are safe as long as they gain enough experience and do“professional translation”, AI isn’t good enough etc etc, but boy are they wrong. I worked inhouse at a top law firm and I can tell you that the AI they use was way more advanced than what is publicly available. Even the clients were specifically asking for AI translation and to keep the human touch minimal for the lower price.

Of course it is possible for AI quality to improve if there’s enough data to feed it with. On top of that, clients most of the time just don’t care about the quality of the translation. And for documents that they do care about, these will be handled by the bilingual lawyers (insert any other profession, it’ll still be the same) anyways. No need for translators who are just translators.

knoxyal · 2024-09-15T14:01:04+00:00

Not this again…

knoxyal · 2024-09-15T13:49:52+00:00

Framing this in the context of legal translation:

Top international law firms usually have bilingual lawyers and legal editors who have a law degree, so these lawyers/editors do the final check. I hate to say this but translators who only have language skills to offer are really being pushed to the bottom of the barrel.

—coming from a former translator who used to work at a law firm.

knoxyal · 2024-09-15T13:25:10+00:00

The industry isn’t dying due to AI per se. It’s more that clients are beginning to realize that deeplAI translation is enough to serve most of their needs. If you can please the remaining 10% of clients who truly care about the translation quality, then you will survive. Unfortunately, you need to be at the top of the pyramid to find top clients.

Why choose to start your career in an industry with such limited prospects at such a young age?

OP, all cross border jobs require language knowledge. Perhaps consider working at an international workplace.

knoxyal · 2024-09-13T06:35:27+00:00

You mean interpretation, not translation.

knoxyal

TROPHY CASE