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Translator / Interpreter — tasks, one by one
The unit of analysis is the task, not the job title. Each one below carries its direction, whether the judgement rests on evidence or on platform inference, the reasoning, and what it does not establish.
Every task on this page#
First-draft translation of routine text
Automating✓ Evidence-backedManuals, product copy, correspondence, internal documents.
Machine translation quality on high-resource language pairs crossed the threshold where a first draft is faster to edit than to write. That single fact restructured the pricing of the entire industry.
Quality is highly uneven across language pairs and domains. Low-resource pairs and specialised terminology remain much weaker than the headline impression suggests.
Post-editing machine output
New task✓ Evidence-backedFixing what the machine got wrong, and knowing where to look for it.
This is now the dominant paid activity in commercial translation. It is a genuinely different skill from translating: the hard part is spotting fluent text that is confidently wrong.
It is real work, but it is usually priced per word at a fraction of translation rates. More of the industry's hours, less of its income.
Translation where being wrong is expensive
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backedContracts, regulatory filings, clinical material, safety documentation.
Machines draft, but a named person certifies. As with accounting sign-off, the binding constraint is who is liable rather than who is capable.
Certification protects the signature, not the volume of work behind it. Expect the same documents to need a named certifier at a fraction of the hours, which is a pay structure change more than a job count change.
Deciding what to change, not just how to say it
Still human-led≈ Platform inferenceTranscreation, market adaptation, and telling a client their message will not land.
Requires knowing the target audience as a lived thing and having the standing to push back on the client's brief. The output is a judgement about the market, not a rendering of the source.
Transcreation is a small, high-end slice of a market whose bulk is volume translation. Being safe in this slice says nothing about whether there is room in it for the translators displaced from the rest.
Interpreting in the room
Being augmented≈ Platform inferenceReal-time, in a negotiation or clinical setting, where you also read what is not being said.
Real-time speech translation works and is improving, but the interpreter is also managing turn-taking, register and trust between two parties. In high-stakes rooms, participants still want a person accountable for the rendering.
The preference for an accountable human is strongest in exactly the settings that are rarest — courts, clinics, negotiations. Routine interpreting, which is most of the hours, has fewer defenders.