Translation - art & business » Business issues »
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Thread poster: José J. Martínez
sdvplatt
sdvplatt
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
Member (2003)
German to English
+ ...
depends on your language combination. Oct 5, 2018

José J. Martínez wrote:

Business is down since mid-year...what is happening? I have been translating as an Outsourcer since 2007. The business was normally less during the hot months but lately I have had weeks of zero jobs.

I have a hunch that many persons are charging less and less, some are using machine translation and that is why they can do that (that is my theory). Possibly some are using CATs that are becoming more popular than others and if one does not have that CAT, the disqualification is immediate.

Please, an opinion of what is happening.


Looking back the peak for DE EN was post Crash funnily enough.
That golden era 2009-2013 ish.
The levels today are nothing like they were then and I defy anyone to say any different.
That doesn't mean you cant make a living but as a main profession it is getting harder each year.

Some possible structural reasons
* In my pair so much work was done and that means better and better memories and machine translation
* German businesses had a lot of new translation work to do as exports became a priority. Now much of it is maintaining existing texts, hence less
* Perhaps people are more open to the lifestyle than they were before so more and more people are working as translators. The numbers of very good translators however have remained steady or fallen during this period and this is a clue as to what you need to do to stay relevant and competitive.
 
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Less and less work.







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