

It’s also a lot less pleasant of a task, it’s like wearing a straightjacket, and compared to CAT (eg: automatically using glossaries for technical terms) actually slows you down, if the translation is quite far from how you would naturally phrase things.
Source: Parents are Professional translators. (They’ve certainly seen work dry up, they don’t do MTPE it’s still not really worth their time, they still get $$$ for critically important stuff, and live interpreting [Live interpreting is definetely a skill that takes time to learn compared to translation.])
Some of it is driven by translation agencies, which will refer work to freelance translators.
I would say the biggest gap is that many customers aren’t even bothering to use translators at all, and the ones that do realize it needs fixing up don’t really understand the work involved, many people misunderstand translation as being a 1-1 process, and think that Machine translation got you most of the way there.
It’s also the are we willing to pay that much more, when the shitty translation is “good enough”.
One big issue is that translation as a low barrier of entry, and many people will accept stupid work at stupid rates, and to keep rates high you have to prove the added value.
(Proving the added value as also gotten harder, as some clients even more often than before will “correct” your work before publish it, as highlighted in the article)