Jessica Spengler has been translating German into English for educational and historical organisations for over a decade. Based in Brighton, UK, she built a steady career working with publishers, universities, and cultural institutions.
Then came the request that changed everything. A client asked her to compile a glossary to train an AI translation system — and in that moment, the 52-year-old understood exactly what was coming.
"That was the day I really thought... my job is going," she told AFP.
The decline has been gradual but unmistakable. Spengler no longer receives requests to translate corporate press releases or user manuals — work that used to be a reliable entry point into the profession. "Some publishers have offered me lower rates than I was getting 10 years ago," she said.
What work does come in increasingly takes the form of post-editing: cleaning up AI-generated translations. The pay is lower, but the workload is often heavier. Translators "have to rewrite the whole thing, redo the translations, but they still only get paid the reduced rate," explained Holly Parsons, a 24-year-old Spanish-to-English translator at the beginning of her career.
Parsons, who still earns most of her income working as a children's activity leader, put it bluntly: "It's hard as a translator to actually charge what the work is worth because people just don't want to pay it."
The IMF estimated in 2024 that more than two-thirds of British workers perform tasks that AI could potentially carry out, making the UK more exposed than many other advanced economies. Morgan Stanley reported that British companies that adopted AI cut their workforces by eight percent in the year to October 2025 — more than in Germany, Japan or Australia.
For Spengler, the question isn't whether AI will transform translation — it already has. The question is whether there will still be a place for human judgment in the profession, or whether the race to the bottom on price will simply drive everyone out who can't afford to stay.