$40-$110/hr translation and linguistics work, on your schedule
Review a model's translation the way you would a colleague's work before delivery. Flag the botched idiom, the wrong register, the cultural reference that lands flat. You know what the words should become, not just what they mean.
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Hi, we're Zac and Jack, the founders of Terac. We want to talk to you directly, because you are the most important part of what we're building.
Terac is a community of experts. People who have spent years getting good at something specific and hard. The world is about to need more of you, not less. As AI takes on more of the world's work, the bottleneck shifts to the people who actually know what they're talking about.
Expert labor is the rarest resource in the world right now, and it is shockingly hard to find. The companies that need a translator's eye on a literal rendering that loses the meaning spend weeks chasing people, paying placement fees, and settling for whoever is available. Meanwhile thousands of qualified people are sitting with knowledge that no one ever asks for.
That gap is what we're here to close. Every project that lands on Terac is routed to the people who actually know the answer, on their schedule, paid fairly, and only when the work is verified. No middleman taking a cut of your time. No vague gigs. No chasing checks.
We care about every single person in this community. If you join Terac, you're not a row in a database to us. We read the feedback. We answer the emails. We will fight for you when a customer is being unreasonable, and we will be honest with you when something on our side is broken. The quality of this panel is our entire company, and we owe you a serious bar.
If you've made it this far, here is what we're asking: claim your profile. Put your expertise on the record. Let the world's most ambitious teams come find you for the work only you can do.
Translation & Linguistics questions
Still curious? Write to us at support@terac.com.
Narrow specialization is an advantage. Labs need reviewers who catch the specific error a model makes on a German court ruling versus a general business document, and those errors differ by domain. Legal, medical, technical, and financial language pairs are among the highest-demand combinations on the platform.
Credentials like ATA certification, a court interpreter certification, or a sworn translator designation strengthen your profile and are verified at onboarding, but they are not required. What matters is demonstrable professional practice: documented translation output, interpreting work, or localization experience at a professional level in your pair.
Mostly evaluative. You review AI translations for accuracy, register, idiom, and cultural fit, like a post-editor or QA reviewer rather than a primary translator. Some tasks ask you to handle a passage yourself so a model learns your reasoning, but you are not hired to produce client-ready deliverables.
Interpreting qualifies. Conference, court-certified, community, and ASL or BSL interpreters bring real-time language-transfer skills written reviewers do not. If demand for your modality is lower at a given time, your profile stays active for translation review and conversational or interview-format work where live judgment is the point.
No. The work never requires sharing client materials or anything covered by an existing obligation. All tasks use purpose-built or synthetic content from Terac and the lab, not documents from your clients. You review it under a standard NDA, consistent with ethics frameworks like ATA, AIIC, and most state court interpreter programs.
Why your expertise matters
Translation AI botches an idiom, slips a false friend past you, and collapses the inflectional distinctions that Arabic or Finnish depend on. Catching that takes a working translator who hears register and pragmatic intent, not a model fluent on the surface. Your corrections teach these tools what the words should become, not just what they mean.
How pay works
Top of the $40-$110/hr band goes to translators with domain depth (legal, pharma, financial), certification like ATA or EN 17100, and lower-resource language pairs where few qualified reviewers exist. Work is remote and paid by the verified hour, compensated once Terac confirms completion, not per word or per project as in traditional markets.
What the work looks like
A sample of the translation and linguistics work you would pick up. Every project is scoped, remote, and paid on verified completion.
- Review an English-to-Portuguese legal translation for register, flagging calque errors and false cognates that would mislead a native reader.
- Score machine-translated pharma package inserts against the source using MQM error typology, flagging mistranslations that create patient risk.
- Write three contrastive examples handling untranslatable cultural references in Japanese-to-English literary text, with reasoning at each point.
- Check whether a model's Spanish output keeps formal and informal address (usted vs. tu) straight across customer-service dialogues.
- Annotate AI subtitles for a French documentary, marking segmentation errors, over-long reading times, and lost speaker register.
- Write a gold-standard reference translation in your native language for a prompt set seeding a new multilingual evaluation suite.
Specialties we match
Translation & Linguistics projects span a wide range of focus areas. Tell us where you go deep and we route the work that fits.
- ATA-certified translation
- CAT tools (SDL Trados, memoQ, OmegaT)
- Machine translation post-editing (MTPE)
- Legal and contract translation
- Medical/pharmaceutical translation
- ISO 17100 quality assurance
- Corpus linguistics
- Terminology management (SDL MultiTerm)
- Transcreation and localization
- Subtitling and audio description
- Computational linguistics
- Low-resource language pairs
