Well, my wife was a pro translator but she found she could make a nicer living by writing books. If it paid enough, she would not have quit (and she was on the

Well, my wife was a pro translator but she found she could make a nicer living by writing books. If it paid enough, she would not have quit (and she was on the higher scale with corp clients). You need a good network and clients who want to pay for quality. The reality is that most just pop text into Google translate, fix the result a bit and that’s it. You cannot compete if companies are willing to pay for crap like that. One of the last projects was a German to English documentary and the client sent over a translation by someone ‘asking a fraction of the price’; the translation was simply wrong for a large amount in of the text. German has many things words and contexts that simply are wrong if you translate them directly. The last project which was the end of it was a Portugese book; she (my wife) translated 1 chapter but to make the humor and cultural references work in English, it was a very expensive chapter. So they found someone on Fiverr who did it. I am not kidding; it is some of the worst things I have ever seen; this translator, like the amateur he is, mixes up he/she and puts ‘the’ in front of everything. This is indeed what you get if you naively translate PT to EN but now that book was published totally unreadable for an English audience. But it was very cheap. That was the last straw. So tl;dr definitely money as far as I see around me. Because to recognise quality you have to spend time and know both languages well, it seems many pick cheap. If you see translations for Netflix movies and shows from ES, PT, FR, NL, DE, I often go back (I watch everything OV but with subtitles and the subtitles mostly stink) thinking, what, he really didn’t say that at all. There are massive errors in there along with the flattening and badly translated nuances. Humor never works unless it’s slapstick because translating humor is really expensive.