Teaching and community
What does an Interpreter or Translator do?
Helping people learn, cope and get back on their feet.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- A screen and a keyboard.
- People all day.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- No two days alike.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $60,170 a year, median
- Interpreters and Translators, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Bachelor's degree
- A year or two, often while earning something.
- Jobs
- +2% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing slowly
What is good about it
- No two days are the same, if that is what you want from a week.
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
What people find hard about it
- Intense concentration
- Irregular freelance work
- Machine translation undercutting rates
Machine translation has taken the routine work; live, legal and medical interpreting has held up better.
Will machines take this job?
Hard for machines to take over. Preparation and marking are automating. Presence, trust and pastoral responsibility are not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Interpret one real session voluntarily, then read back what you missed.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.