Fabiano Cid, Chief Solutions Officer at Powerling, details his rocky start as a freelance translator as well as the major industry shifts, the latest of which being AI. He offers his perspective on the future of the business and his place in it, likening himself to an atomic bomb-surviving cockroach (in the best way possible).

Have you ever read Multilingual magazine? Which is your favorite part?
I am a longtime reader of Multilingual magazine. When I had my localization company in Brazil (Ccaps Translation and Localization), the printed edition of MultiLingual was my main source of information about the industry because we did not have the online resources that we do now. 

It may sound unusual, but I love Multilingual editorials, as they allow me to focus on what truly matters in our field and give me a sense of where things are headed.

How did you get involved in the translation business?
By the hands of Renato Beninatto. 

I thought I would build a career in the arts, as I had graduated from drama school and loved writing. In 1996, I had just published a slightly too-metalinguistic novella, called Romance. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative may have been a little hermetic to make it a bestseller (and maybe a little too presumptuous for a 25-year-old). 

Theater had its magic, but it wasn’t paying the bills. I began looking for a “proper job” after graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in Language and Literature from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

In 1997, Renato posted an ad for translators, I applied, and when he learned that I had my own website with my writings (“You have a home page?,” he asked using the lingo of the time), he hired me right there and then. 

I worked for his company (pre-LMI, pre-Berlitz) for only three months. I moved to London that year and became a freelance translator.

Since you entered the translation business, how has the business landscape changed?
Back in the 90s, translation was very promising with the advent of localization. 

In 1999, after returning to Brazil, I opened my own company, and a few months later I found myself in New York talking to a venture capital representative and explaining that, despite the threat of the internet bubble bursting (any resemblance to AI is not a mere coincidence), localization was a solid business because computers were there to stay, and so was globalization.

That seemingly perfect pitch secured me a promise of USD 1 million in investment, as long as I fixed the partnership situation. (My associate was leaving for Ireland to work at Microsoft; I had a laptop and worked from home.) I did and returned to the investor with a very basic structure. 

I built the minimum, but the bubble burst, and I bade my first million goodbye.

Technology has changed the scenario, and while we have managed to stay afloat (as professionals, as businesses, and as an industry) the process of reinventing ourselves has been constant and often brutal. But we persist, and I am sure we will continue thriving.

Could you share your experience working with your first client or on your first project?
In Rio, the project managers I had been working with told me that I should bring a laptop with me to London, as they could send me work. That all sounded very mysterious and absurd, but I was going to London with very little cash in my pocket, and the only thing resembling job security was my friend’s temp gig selling sandwiches in Knightsbridge.

I brought the laptop and applied for a job offer in a Brazilian Portuguese translators’ forum. I had only had three months of experience, with careful support and scrutiny from in-house revisers. Delivering my first translation work, completed on my own, was something else. 

And I failed miserably. 

My work was rejected, I did not get paid for it, the laptop crashed, I overslept and missed the sandwich round, and had to work two weeks for free.

Welcome to your new life! 

This was what I call the three-month curse: Whenever you move to another country, the first three months are hell, but you must endure this rite of passage.

I didn’t know this at the time, but I did persist, and six months later I was making more money than I could have ever imagined — for that same client who had initially refused my work, and a few more clients I had collected along the way.

Do you believe it’s a good time to enter the translation business?
It’s always a good time, just never an easy one.

Every few years someone declares that translation is dead. I’ve heard that since I started: First computer assisted translation (CAT) tools would kill it, then machine translation (MT), now AI (which is statistical MT on steroids). Yet here we are. What’s changing is not the need for translation, but the definition of it.

If you come in thinking that this is a static craft, you’ll be disappointed. If you come in ready to build bridges between people, systems, and cultures, you’ll never be bored.

Where do you see yourself professionally in the next 10 years?
I’ll be 65, so ideally I’d be retired, sipping caipirinhas in Salvador (where I am now, celebrating my 55th birthday). But that will never happen. I’m like Cher and the atomic bomb cockroaches: AI or not, you’ll never get rid of us. 

Hopefully I’ll still be doing work that matters, just at a slower pace.

What predictions do you have for the future of the translation business?
I hate playing The Oracle, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that our industry always survives its own obituaries. Every few years we face an “end of translation” moment, and every time, we reinvent ourselves instead.

I think the future will belong to those who stop seeing what we do as a standalone service and start treating it as part of a larger ecosystem: data, governance, content. The boundaries between translation, creation, and strategy will keep blurring.

Technology will get better, faster, and cheaper, but meaning and experience will still need mediation. We’ll adapt, as we always have; not by resisting change, but by translating it.