The State of My Career

As 2025 comes to a close and the retrospectives begin, I admit to being influenced to take a look back at how things have gone, and how they are going. One of the dominant topics in the entire translation industry is, of course, AI and its impact. But this post is not, specifically, about that. Rather, I am looking at a trend and just… Wondering. Because my career has changed *dramatically* in the last few years, and 2025 has been perhaps the biggest display of it.

I became a translator full time in 2016. From the beginning, I was a generalist in the sense that I was desperate. A full time career which had let me support my wife and still very young son had just run out its lifespan, and my given skills were such that, basically, words were all I had.

I took all kinds of work. Corporate websites, newspaper articles (for, ugh, right wing papers), tech manuals, restaurant menus, games, manga… Anything. The first year or two were pretty hectic as I learned about what I was and was not capable of handling. I also learned the basic arithmetic of rate setting (As described in this 2020 post) and by 2019 or so, my trajectory seemed a slow, stable upward growth. I was able to regularly raise rates and was earning enough that my wife could quit her job to manage the house and the business side (bank accounts, tax documents, etc.) of my translation. We even founded a company to make this simpler.

It was a very piecemeal kind of business, but it worked. It kept us solidly middle-class comfortable.

Then, well, things started to change. Let’s look at some numbers from my invoice records.

In 2022, I had 30 clients to whom I sent invoices. Some were big, some were small. Some new, some old. One thing to note is that from April of 2022, I raised my rate one whole yen across the board and immediately shed some translation broker/company clients. That was actually fine with me, because they were all lowball clients. 2022 is also the year I signed my first contract with Pushkin Vertigo, for The Devil’s Flute Murders.

Income ended up being higher than the previous year, as it had every year to that point since 2016.

In 2023, though, the number of clients I invoiced dropped to 12. 30, to 12. Again, though, my general level of income stayed relatively stable, even slightly higher than 2022. The explanation for this stability is that 1) I have a client that keeps me on “retainer” for checking work and pays a stable monthly income and 2) I got more Pushkin Vintage contracts. Novels do not pay a *lot* in general terms, but a couple of big payments, particularly in British pounds, really boost the bottom line. This is when we began working on Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, which have basically changed my life… But I didn’t know that then.

In 2024, the total client number fell to 11, with some older clients replaced by new ones in the publishing world—Japanese rights agencies and publishers, who heard my name after my role in the deal to get Uketsu published in English. So, again, fewer overall clients and individual jobs, but income has remained safe. I finished a couple of translations for Pushkin contracted in 2023, and signed one new contract. (Note: I get half an advance on signing the contract and half on turn in, so payments can get scattered across years.)

And then came 2025. I invoiced five clients in 2025, not counting Pushkin (for completing Strange Buildings). FIVE. One is Nippon.com, who sends me basically an article a week to translate and has done so for several years now. Another is the same client that keeps me on checking retainer and occasionally sends me translation work. And the other three are literary agencies/publishers asking for samples and synopses.

I’m currently waiting for two book translation contracts that will hopefully come in by the end of the year, but who knows? Publishing is a slow moving business, it seems.

Anyway, I think it is safe to say that my “generalist” translation career is dead and buried.

No more corporate websites, no more menus, no more sake breweries. All gone.

The work that kept my family housed and fed from 2016 to 2023 is no longer the work I am doing. It’s questionable if I would even call this the same career. I no longer have to keep on top of invoicing all the time, or fine-tune every schedule to see if I can fit another job in today, or keep a running list of all the different client contacts.

Now, if we are totally honest, it’s not all that missed. I like the actual jobs I get now basically across the board, which has not always been true. Hell, I get to work in publishing! Making books! How blessed am I? Young me would be ecstatic. But it also makes me nervous, because my current income is basically luck based. I mean, yeah, the book contracts are still coming in and Uketsu is selling like a house of hotcakes on fire and whatever other metaphors you want to throw in there, so thank GOD I get royalties. Also, I am getting contacted by new publishers about new projects. But if the market for Japanese lit in translation tanks next year, I’m cooked. (Please keep buying books in translation!)

Now, of course I wonder about the death of my generalist work. The drop is just so drastic, so clear and undeniable. The natural thing is to blame LLMs and corporate insistence on using them, leading to end clients leaning on the kinds of translators and translation companies that embrace the technology. I am not that kind of translator and make no secret of it. But it’s surely not the only reason. As I said above, I increase my rates regularly and that leads to client turnover. I also am in agreement with Chris Pearce on Bluesky that there is some inevitable influence on the demand for English due to the collapse of the United States as a desirable place to do business. So, for any given client, it’s hard to pin down the precise reason they’ve stopped sending me work.

They just, have.

And so we come to the future. Who knows what will happen? At the very least, I can count on a couple more books from Uketsu to sustain my family short term. Given the long turnaround and single, annual payment of royalties, if sales keep up they might even secure us until my son gets into college, which is pretty much my bare minimum ambition at this point. And maybe I’ll win the lottery again and find another international bestseller to translate. Wouldn’t that be a pisser?

I am not actually anxious about my career at this point, which is odd given how anxious I am about basically everything, all of the time. But good luck has got me this far, and I’m trusting in it for just a little while longer. I think the general abysmal state of the world is the greater concern, as far as anxiety goes.

But, yeah. Now that I look at it, it’s pretty extreme how much my job has changed this year. I am deeply grateful for the remaining clients I do have, and for the fact that I have income that is no longer dependent on “number of times I hit my keyboard per day.” I am so, so lucky. There’s really not much else to say.

I hope your luck, wherever you are out there needing it, also holds out.