UncategorisedTranslation
Multilingual, one of the best magazines for language services, recently published a report on the current conditions of freelancers operating in the language industry.
The data comes from a survey promoted by Milestone Localization, a language service provider based in India, that saw the participation of more than 800 freelancers operating around the world.
Although reports of this type represent an excellent source of information on the conditions of freelancers all around the world, they often lack pragmatism by excessively broadening the scope of investigation.
Specifically, this survey involved professionals from North and South America (3 and 9%), Europe (23%), Africa (7%), Middle East (7%), and Asia (49%).
This wide inclusion of professionals from every corner of the globe, despite having the advantage of photographing the whole situation, runs the risk of being too universal, including heterogeneous reality within a single report (for professional conditions, market and other factors).
For this reason, to obtain a snapshot of the conditions of freelancers in the Italian language industry, we have created an ad hoc survey. The results of which will be published on our website.
The results of the global report on freelancers jobs
While waiting for the last participants in our survey, it may still be interesting to evaluate the data provided by Milestone.
For this survey, participants were asked about their job profile, professional habits, knowledge and skills, income, and what they thought about AI.
Participants were almost entirely freelance translators (98%). The remaining part worked in the fields of subtitling, transcription, and interpretation.
The results show that more than half (about 54%) of the respondents are satisfied with their income, 30% expressed a neutral opinion, and only 16% said they were unsatisfied. In this case, for example, a more in-depth analysis of the countries in which the participants operate should be carried out. So as to compare the data with other relevant factors, such as average income and GDP per capita.
To come back to the results, another relevant data shows that 40% have declared that two-thirds of their income depends on regular customers, emphasising how this condition allows them to have an almost constant income.
Finally, 74% of participants who implemented AI and machine translation tools in their work process saw an increase in productivity and efficiency. But 58% of the respondents fear that these artificial intelligence systems could pose a threat to their profession.
And you, do you feel represented by this data?
Image by Lucas from Pexels
