Interpreters and Translators

AUTOMATION RISK

CALCULATED

70%

risk level

POLLING

73%

Based on 1,841 votes

LABOR DEMAND

GROWTH

20.2%

by year 2032

WAGES

$57,090

or $27.44 per hour

Volume

51,560

as of 2023

SUMMARY

JOB SCORE

4.4/10

70% (High Risk)

High Risk (61-80%): Jobs in this category face a significant threat from automation, as many of their tasks can be easily automated using current or near-future technologies.

More information on what this score is, and how it is calculated is available here.

Sentiment

The following graph(s) are included wherever there is a substantial amount of votes to render meaningful data. These visual representations display user poll results over time, providing a significant indication of sentiment trends.

Sentiment over time (quarterly)

Sentiment over time (yearly)

Wages

Moderately paid relative to other professions

In 2023, the median annual wage for 'Interpreters and Translators' was $57,090, or $27 per hour

'Interpreters and Translators' were paid 18.8% higher than the national median wage, which stood at $48,060

Wages over time

Comments

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MayPat (Low) 24 days ago

I don't think AI would be able to translate or interpret flawlessly. AI is just stored info which is being displayed. It can't understand phrases or casual slangs unless they are encoded in it. A human could do it naturally as they have had an experience of it. AI is just a ' just in case' and still it is not even close to being accurate. A few languages can only be spoken, amd I don't think such languages could be added into a machine. It's hereditary sometimes and you just pick up a language. Language is just a ton of practice. AI might be able to translate but I think I would still prefer a human cause they know what they are saying unlike machines which just try to use what they have been fed with. More the natural and casual more understandable.

Ps : Google translate is still funny, I tried translating 1 sentence into like almost all languages and the sentence was not even close to what I had originally typed. I don't think it's gonna get better

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Constantin (Moderate) 25 days ago

AI is getting better and better at translating texts, however some of them still struggling with understanding the context, but I think this is just a matter of time

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A (Low) 25 days ago

People want people, not machines. People feel culturally and socially comfortable with those who share their language, and that'll never happen with a robot.

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Ashwin Naik 2 months ago

Working with my marketing and sales team on a huge project, we needed to translate a ton of images and content into multiple languages. That's when we found Translate.photo. This tool has been a game-changer for us, allowing us to translate creatives into 75+ languages with just one click on Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and Canva. What used to take days now only takes a few hours, making our workflow incredibly efficient. Plus, it’s been a lifesaver for creating content for my ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. If you need to go global effortlessly, definitely check out Translate.photo!

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Milan (Highly likely) 3 months ago

Machine translation has existed for a few years and neural networks and AI will take it to the next level. As an example, Google Translate does poor with context and slang. ChatGPT on the other hand, was never intentionally taught to translate, but I found it does far better on understanding modern slang and making sure the sentences it generate actually make sense. With interpretation, the biggest difficulty for humans is short-term memory. AI does not have this issue.

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Noskaj (No chance) 3 months ago

Ai won’t be able to translate context in some languages and it will over complicate words a native would never say

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D (Highly likely) 4 months ago

an interpreters job requires you to have incredibly good short term memory and a large vocabulary that you can access instantly. A human will always show flaws in these regards, when compared to a machine. This in turn leads to a good probability of miscommunication. In my opinion, human interpreters will only be neccessary in high end communication, and yet still it might be better for them to be correcting the work of a computer, than interpreting themselves. The only things that save this job are government requirements for some administrative proccesses, the need to demonstrate wealth in some cases and the cultural differences, that an interpreter can notice in live conversations.

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Johanna Ellsworth 4 months ago

Translators and texters are already scrambling for work at ridiculously low rates today (in 2024). I have seen several quotes made by German translator colleagues that are being "offered" payment of € 0,1 (approx. 1 USD) per word... I especially see the danger of future bland literature, media articles and movie scripts "created" by AI, which will shape future generations into creatures that won't think creatively, artistically and critically. Only that which is imperfect, i.e. slightly off, is art...

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Remigiusz (Moderate) 8 months ago

While computer translators are getting better and better they are still far from perfect. They made simple mistakes, often translating too literally. That's why I believe that there will be place for a human overseer, at least for now.

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Ildiko (Moderate) 9 months ago

Machine translation develops amazingly fast and well. Mostly based on the already translated texts. I welcome that when using machine translation, I don't have to type the words, the software does it for me.

However, we humans are still needed to correct the sometimes amazingly stupid solutions the machine offers when the text is completely new and there are no precedents. Anyway, I would not advise my daughter to choose this profession, except when she likes text editing...

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Kareem (Low) 12 months ago

Context, culture and words that have multiple different meanings will be hard to understand for AI. The hardest languages will be unlikely to get replaced by AI

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Daniel Valdes (Low) 12 months ago

I have been a medical interpreter for some time now and I really don't see our job being replaced soon. Just in one language there are dozens of different dialects and registers which can include a lot of different words to refer to the same thing. You have to read the context around the conversation to make sense of all of the senseless things the low English proficient client says sometimes.

Also interpreters and translators are two very different jobs with different automation risks, I don't think they should be together in one category.

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Carlos Fiuza (Highly likely) 1 year ago

Note that translation (converting a written text from one language to another) and interpretation (converting a live speech from one language to another) are different activities.

Both are likely to be automated in the near future, since there are no constraints in this realm that cannot be overcome by AI, sooner or later.

Nevertheless, automation will probably come much sooner to translation (as a matter of fact, to a great extent it already has) than to interpretation.

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Jalves (Low) 1 year ago

A really good translation cannot be mimicked by AI simply because AI can't distinguish social cues necessary to humor.

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Cheesd Pepperoni (Moderate) 1 year ago

translators already exist, and with the rapid advance of AI that we're seeing even today, i think that translators will be almost completely phased out except for a couple sensitive applications here and there

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Thomas (Low) 1 year ago

Translators will be replaced by machines only if we accept to adopt a very narrow view of language as a code used to clearly communicate a message. Language is nothing like that. Unfortunately, dumb capitalist companies and boffins are convinced that language is similar to coding

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Paula (Highly likely) 1 year ago

I didn't think so in 2019 or even 2021. But now, May 2023, with Chat GPT4 and the moratorium on AI R&D I'm not so sure. There will still be post-editing, I think, but I do believe the profession is under threat.

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Vovin (Highly likely) 1 year ago

I give it 5-10 years before machine translation is the new normal, it's already happening and will simply be cheaper and faster (not to mention that some clients don't seem to care that much about nuanced, very polished texts). The current translators will be reduced to proofreaders/post-MT editors, for the most part.

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Edith (Highly likely) 1 year ago

20 years from now, only the most creative and sensitive translation work (max. 1%) will still be done by people. I expect that 80% of the work will already be done by ChatGPT and the likes in 2025 (especially when taking e.g. 2015 as a reference point, as nowadays already a lot of translations are either done completely by DeepL or Google Translate or post-edited to make them fit for purpose).

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Edith 1 year ago

Yes, and it will happen quickly in most text types and specialities (except for literature, slogans etc.). In 2010, I still translated the subject line of a Finnish government letter word by word using my dictionary before calling our Finnish distributor to get more information. In 2015, Google Translate was already able to give quite a good idea what such a letter was about. In 2020, Google Translate NT and DeepL still have funny mistakes but usually make even texts in small languages easily understandable. And now Chat GPT had arrived; within a few months already as good as DeepL, and I don't doubt it will be as good as 80% of the human translators within a few years. That's good enough for most companies that need translations, so the human translation market will collapse.

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