# China's translators association reported a 2025 workforce of 6.867 million and pay rising at over 60% of firms, while industry output edged down to 70.12 billion yuan

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20260428-translator-4
Date: 2026-04-28 · Stage: Labour impact
Can this record move a task judgement? yes
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/translator

## Scope

Mainland China, the association's own industry census. Against its 2025 report (2024 data: 70.8 billion yuan output, 6.808 million workers), the workforce rose about 0.9% while output fell about 1%. The headline workforce number is roughly six times the 1.135 million counted as full-time translators, so most of it is not full-time work. The same report puts 2,183 firms with AI translation as their main business and calls human-machine collaboration the industry's basic consensus; the 2024 report had already said over 90% of firms were deploying large models.

## Source

- 中国翻译协会《2026中国翻译行业发展报告》发布稿(一手) — https://www.tac-online.org.cn/2026-04/28/content_43414810.html (primary source)

## What this means

The industry consolidated rather than shrank: output value fell about 1% while the counted workforce rose about 1% and over 60% of firms reported pay rising. Read with the association calling human-machine collaboration the basic consensus, the picture is a profession that repriced its work around post-editing rather than one that lost its headcount.

## What it does not show yet

These are association figures, not government statistics, and the workforce total is about six times the full-time count — so a rising headline number can hide falling work per person. Output value is nominal yuan, which mixes price and volume: the same words translated for less money look like a small decline, not like a collapsing rate card.

## How to verify it yourself

Ask any agency you work with for their per-thousand-word rate for post-editing against their rate for translation from scratch, and what share of their volume each accounted for this year and two years ago. The ratio between those two rates is what this profession is actually repricing.


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