I’m a student looking for a part time job to make some money. Since I’m a native speaker of two languages, I thought translating might be nice since it fills quite a unique niche where
- the job can be done wholly on a computer, ie. remotely, giving me freedom, but
- the job is not technical in nature, but rather very intuition-heavy, giving the logical part of my brain time to rest after studying for my engineering degree.
Translating really does feel like doing art in comparison to eg. programming, and I find it genuinely relaxing. The problem is that translators are increasingly being replaced by AI and this will continue in the future, meaning it will be hard for me to get a job in this field. So I wanted to ask you if you can think of any other jobs I could try that fill this niche – remote but intuitive. Any ideas?
I’m not sure if it’s offered as a part-time job, but you might look into localization jobs. Sometimes (often?) they may be the same exact job, but in the situations that they’re not it may help to find jobs you might otherwise miss.
The problem with AI translations with some languages is that their results can be far too literal and miss much needed nuance to deliver the desired message, so: localization. Like you said, translation, especially good translation, is an art, and a major part of that is in localizing the translations for different audiences.
Translation has been going the way of the dodo, unfortunately. It’s pretty different but utilizes similar skills, so you might consider looking into teaching or tutoring one or both of your languages online. There can be a pretty big demand for that, especially if you don’t mind teaching English early in the morning or late at night (assuming you are in the Americas–the biggest demand comes from China).
