Karolina Jarmolowska’s interpreting career has taken her from courts and police stations to conferences across Europe. Here, she discusses the language services industry’s changing landscape and why she predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to shrink the field.

How did you get involved in the language services business?

I studied for my master’s degree in English Studies at the University of Warsaw, always intending to become a translator. After my fourth year — just weeks after Poland joined the European Union (EU) and Polish citizens could work legally in some member states — I went to Ireland in search of a summer job. As it happened, I ended up staying much longer. In 2005, I applied for a freelance community interpreter role. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what community interpreting involved, but I had to learn quickly.

My career began in Dublin, interpreting in courts and police stations for Polish witnesses and defendants. Meanwhile, I completed my MA thesis. After two years, I realized I could no longer handle waking up in the middle of the night to interpret at police stations, only to then appear in court in the morning. The subject matter was also challenging — often involving serious cases like rape and murder — and it became too much.

However, I loved the challenges of interpreting and the fact that it was never boring. So, I decided to return to Poland and pursue a qualification in conference interpreting at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Still, my time in Ireland was the decisive factor that shaped my professional life. I drew on my experience as a court interpreter to delve deeper into communication issues in Irish police stations and courts, which led to my PhD dissertation on the impact of translated witness statements on criminal trials.  

Since graduating from the postgraduate conference interpreting course in Kraków, I have worked full-time as a conference interpreter with Polish, English, and Italian.

Since you entered the language services industry, how has the business landscape changed?

For me, the landscape changed dramatically after COVID. Following a few scary months of no work and lockdowns, we had to adapt quickly to remote simultaneous interpreting. Some clients embraced Zoom meetings almost immediately, while others waited for a return to “business as usual” — but that never really happened.

Today, most of my interpreting work is done remotely from my home office, with occasional trips for face-to-face meetings. I love this change because it gives me even more freedom than before. Thanks to the shift to remote work, I was able to move and now live in a small town near Rome. As an introvert, working from home suits me perfectly, allowing me to do what I love — interpreting — while enjoying a better work-life balance.

For example, this Monday through Wednesday, I work from home during a European Works Council meeting (the participants are on-site, but interpreters connect remotely). After finishing work today, I’ll fly to Germany to work on-site in a physical booth on Thursday and Friday, then return to Rome on Saturday. I’m writing this in October, which is high season for conferences, so it’s not always this busy, but the combination of remote and on-site work makes it manageable. I’ve welcomed this change with open arms!

Could you share your experience working with your first client or on your first project?

Yes, and I have to say it was by far my most difficult assignment. I was recruited by a Dublin-based agency that provided interpreters for Irish courts. They hired me because a high-profile Polish-English trial in the High Court was about to start. I had little experience and was initially reluctant, but the agency assured me that there would be an official court interpreter who would interpret out loud, while I would serve as a language assistant to one of the defendants, helping him communicate with his legal team and discuss strategy. That seemed reasonable, so I agreed.

Little did I know (nor did anyone else!) that on the first day, the defendant would dismiss his entire legal team and decide to represent himself in court. I’ll never forget the judge’s words: “Now, please come with your interpreter to the front bench.” Suddenly, I was the interpreter, responsible for interpreting everything the defendant said in court, including his closing speech to the jury. Thanks to the collaboration with the main court interpreter, the judge, and the legal teams, the trial proceeded smoothly, but it was an incredibly stressful experience. The trial lasted three weeks, and I could hardly eat from the stress. The silver lining is that, since then, no assignment has seemed too difficult or stressful.

Do you believe it’s a good time to enter the language services business?

To be completely honest, I don’t think so. There is little room for new professionals in the ever-shrinking translation and interpreting market. I don’t believe the job will disappear entirely — there will always be a need for certified translators or interpreters with security clearance, i.e., someone who bears responsibility for the content of the translation. However, for translators, much of the work has already disappeared, and the remaining jobs often involve post-editing machine-translated texts.

This hasn’t happened yet in conference interpreting, but there are experiments and pilot projects with speech-to-speech automated language processing, and in some applications, such tools may soon replace interpreters. At the moment, the quality and delay of these tools leave much to be desired, but progress is inevitable, and soon the interpreting market will also experience a dip due to AI-driven tools. In other words, there is less and less work for human translators and interpreters, so I wouldn’t recommend this path to someone who is still undecided about their career. In a recent study published by Microsoft, translators and interpreters ranked first in terms of replaceability by AI — the data speaks for itself.

Where do you see yourself professionally in the next 10 years?

In 10 years, I’ll be 10 years away from retirement age, and I would love to retire while still doing what I love — interpreting. I have my doubts about whether that will be possible, but time will tell. I might move into language consulting or public speaking training, or perhaps return to university lecturing. I do reflect on this, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night. I believe that, as interpreters, we have a wealth of unique skills that can be valuable in almost any profession.

What predictions do you have for the future of the language services business?

AI will continue to transform the way we work. Some translators and interpreters will leave the profession, while others will embrace technology rather than resist it. I imagine that, in the future, interpreters will work alongside AI “boothmates” — a human interpreter working with an AI partner, correcting the text generated by AI, much as translators now post-edit machine translations. Or perhaps we’ll be paid to be on standby, called in whenever a language issue arises. Maybe our work will resemble that of theater prompters, whispering the missing words to people speaking a foreign language when they struggle to find the right term.

Eventually, our work as we see it today may become dispensable, but in the meantime, new jobs will emerge for people with our skillset.