Right now in today’s market the translators at the top of the field — those who earn the most, have tons of work, and enjoy the best client options — have collaboration woven deep into their DNA. Their work is under constant review and is revised by their expert peers.

The same is true of the best translation companies — the boutique shops or larger quality-focused companies — where the margins are solid, the work plentiful and interesting, and the clients happy and enthusiastic.

This is the sector of the market where the rates are actually rising. There are parts of this market that cannot even find enough well-qualified translators — they are hungry for them.

The cost of entry into this club is expertise. You absolutely MUST be a subject-matter expert. You absolutely MUST have exceptional writing skills. You absolutely MUST have talent that is in extreme demand.

When every person brings that kind of talent to the table, every OTHER person at the table is eager to learn from them.

That creates a virtuous circle where the product just gets better.

Too many freelancers today are hiding behind the idea that client confidentiality or tight deadlines or low rates are blocking their ability to collaborate. This is idiotic nonsense. It’s really their own confirmation bias that is telling them that their own little sliver of reality with blinders on both sides actually represents the whole rest of the complex market.

It does not.

Often these are the people who are “coasting,” have not learned about their blind spots, are stuck in ruts or are not even aware how poorly their work stacks up against others’.

I know this first-hand because I’ve seen endless examples of it, even from “highly experienced translators” for well over 20 years.

It’s also about to get worse. MUCH worse. Many of these “coasting” translators are producing work that is below the quality produced by Google Translate right now. So they are charging money for a product that anybody can get right now, instantly and for free.

Chris Durban compiled results from a comparison of the work of professional translators in French to English a few years ago and listed Google Translate results in the final column and with the exception of a word or two here or there, GT had performed very well and done even better with terminology in many cases.

Translation clients are increasingly finding out just how good Google Translate is at certain tasks and it turns out it is expert at — wait for it — brute force collaboration. It leverages everything out there that humans have already translated, runs it through a statistical analysis algorithm, and serves it up with a cherry on top in the flash of an eye and a smile. And charges not a penny.

Sure, it’s not always perfect, but then neither are the pictures you take with your smart phone. But those smart phone pictures are very, very, VERY good today, and much better than they were even a few years ago. And they don’t cost you much at all.

This is one reason the digital camera market is collapsing so fast that Kodak couldn’t even survive by relying on digital — it had already been almost completely destroyed by the disappearance of film cameras. Remember those dinosaurs?

The only survivors in this market are going to be those who have the expertise, talent and long-term collaborative expertise to stand way up on the high ground while the flood takes out everybody below.

Those experts get to use $1,000 cameras with sophisticated lenses in studios and charge thousands of dollars to commercial clients who pay them because they are better than the digital cameras or Google Translate or most all other professional translators.

If all you have is language skills, you’re working alone and just staring out and not learning from colleagues, you would be well advised buy a boat to stay afloat in the coming flood. Soon.

It’s crucial that beginning translators learn about the skills they will need to survive as soon as possible in their careers. I recognize that this comes across more as “tough love” than “You go girl!” but the tough love, in my view at least, will be far more likely to keep you warm and dry and happy and successful in your new career long after the “You go girls!” have echoed away into the hills and been forgotten.