LinkedIn is the primary social media platform for translators. The more interesting question is what they actually talk about on LinkedIn.
If you have ever tried to post something meaningful about your work or even just observed what other translators post, you will recognise the difficulty.
What can we post about? A course we completed, a project delivered, our takes on AI, or a reminder of how vulnerable the profession feels nowadays?
Of course all these are our real lived experiences but once shared, they rarely leave a trace. The algorithm keeps the post visible for a while, and then it disappears, having affected little beyond momentary recognition.
We all know LinkedIn best practices but for many translators, the problem is not how to post. It is what to talk about in the first place and more importantly, why should we do so?
This reflection is for translators who feel they should be present on LinkedIn but feel lost once they try.
Why Translators Don’t Find a Solid Thing to Talk About
It is easy to explain this struggle by pointing to personality traits or missing skills: translators are introverted, bad at marketing, uncomfortable with self-promotion. That explanation is convenient, but it misses the deeper issue, it has a lot to do with translator identity.
For years, translators have been positioned primarily as freelancers, in-house employees, or solo business owners. There are two serious issues with any of these identities.
The first issue is they all consider translators as vendors. There is demand on one side and translators meet that demand as vendors whether working solo, through platforms, or agencies. When the demand is low you don’t get much work. This is exactly what we are experiencing right now with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Though lower demand is nothing new in the industry as a whole, because there are always some languages with higher demand and some with less; and also there is the question of seasonality.
The second issue is even grimmer. Whether you work as a freelancer, a solo business or an employee you never own your work. You work as a ghost translator. Once you deliver the translation, it’s not yours.
So, as professional translators, whatever shoes we put on, we are mostly vendors and we don’t own our work. That’s what professional translation is.
Now that you know the true identity of a professional translator, you will understand why translators post on LinkedIn about the threats of AI, the importance of adapting with machine translation, low pay, lack of work and so on. All these are just reactions to something that we don’t have any control of.
The Solution
The future for translators isn’t adapting to AI. It’s exploring translators’ creativity. Who knows if translation will be a thing that will pay in 5 or 10 years. Probably it will, probably it will be a more lucrative profession than now. But the best preparation for that time is doing the right thing now!
The right thing to do is to change the just-vendor identity with that of a writer. What often goes unrecognised is that translators are not only service providers. They are also independent creators. More specifically, they are writers. And because they read constantly, critically, and across domains, they are unusually well-equipped to think and write about ideas.
Yet most translators never treat this as part of their professional life. They hesitate to write unless it directly supports their services. They wait for permission from publishers, editors, institutions before producing anything substantial. As a result, when they turn to LinkedIn, they have little to share beyond professional signals and industry commentary.
This is why posting feels like a battle against monotony and disinterest. There is no underlying body of work to point to.
The alternative is not aggressive marketing or louder opinions. It is authorship. Translators can write about topics they know, care about, or keep returning to. They can run a blog. They can self-commission a book to translate or write and self-publish it. They can make their thinking visible, not as a pitch, but as an act of contribution.
Only then does LinkedIn stop feeling empty. You are no longer trying to invent something to say; you are sharing work that already exists.
Also it’s important to note, in many ways, translators are professional ghostwriters. Their best writing appears under someone else’s name. That makes authorship even more important. If you never create work that carries your voice, your professional presence will always feel thin.
Creating authorship is not about personal branding. It is about owning your identity as a thinking, writing professional. When you share work from that place, you attract an audience that genuinely cares; not because you marketed better, but because you gave them something worth reading.
P.S. Before we sign off, a brief note about Weekly Job Window. If you are currently exploring in-house roles in the language industry, this may be useful. Weekly Job Window is a curated list of in-house language industry jobs, published every week. It is designed to help you search more deliberately, without worrying about missing strong opportunities.
