Gou Juesi grew up influenced by her older brother, loving English and English movies. Her father even encouraged her to translate Terminator dialogues. When it came time for college entrance exams, she rejected her family's suggestion to study finance and chose a medical university's translation program instead. "I worked hard for those scores, I didn't want to waste them on something I didn't like."
During college, she did unpaid subtitle translation, participated in book translation projects, tried every type of work. But graduation season revealed that all her accumulated experience meant nothing to HR. She interviewed at six or seven translation companies — all rejected. Companies wanted "0 years since graduation, 3 years of experience."
She ended up at an alcohol export company doing new media operations, then in PR for a gold chain brand. "Studying translation isn't just good for frying noodles — it can also sell gold."
But she stays optimistic, citing how machine translation renders a diplomatic phrase as "he who plays with fire will get burnt," while human translators chose "hellfire" — the Biblical allusion and diplomatic signal embedded in that choice is something AI cannot achieve.
"AI can't replace humans because humans have brains, AI doesn't." — But for entry-level translators, that sounds more like self-comfort.