(Warning: major naive noob writing this text. Please be patient with me or just skip altogether)
I majored in linguistics (with English and Romanian) in my home country (Bulgaria). I was taught and prepared to understand language and all its underlying systems, taught English to perfection (on the basis of my high-school diploma and an entry exam, i.e. already knowing it pretty well), and Romanian from scratch really intensely. In the later years I was taught specialized translations and finally how to do it all supposedly professionally, as a product on a CAT software.
Well... I graduate in 2022, and there is a certain landscape - pricing, timeframes for how long jobs take, customer expectations and so on. I am of the belief that I have... a good idea of how those things work. Then I get a call from a company to be in their international sales department due to my language (Romanian), and since the job market in my country, and ESPECIALLY in my city already wasn't great, I accept. I don't go into my field. At the same time AI starts coming along. I am busy getting into my job and follow what's going on very loosely.
Well... fast forward to today, I've been getting inquiries for mostly editing/review work with Romanian from friends recommending me to people. This made me ambitious to get back into my field I graduated from. But... what the hell even is "translations" as a job in 2026?
When I got into university I expected it's 2 Word documents - the original for reference, and a draft that will later become a final version God willing. After years of learning in uni I did find out CAT Softwares exist and are the standard so I should learn how to use them to have some semblance of professionalism. But then come to find out the one our professor taught us in uni - WordFast - is not exactly any sort of industry standard and I have a hard time understanding how the "industry standard" ones work. Also I'm talking about their free versions, cause in this poor country good luck getting the full thing without already having work and a bunch of money. And now AI came along and completely threw a wrench in how everything works. I wanna get back into the game, but I'm starting to feel the game is barely anything like what I was taught even just a few years ago.
TLDR: I studied to be a translator and graduated in 2022, got a different job, now I wanna get back into that profession but I feel like nothing's the same as I was taught.
My questions are:
- Are CAT Softwares still a thing (I imagine they are), which ones are still used and how did AI change their place in the whole game?
- How much is AI integrated into the whole process of translation?
- Did the prices and timelines change and how much? Can I get some actual examples to grasp the scope of it?
- Is being an editor-reviewer the new thing? Like I said, I was sought out a few times lately, but to do those sort of jobs after a translator already did the job. Two of my clients were concerned "the translator used AI and I want it to sound natural in the language".
- Just what the hell is going on in general?