$40-$110/hr translation and linguistics work, on your schedule
Review AI-generated translation and localization the way you'd review a colleague's work before delivery. Flag the mistranslated idiom, the wrong register, the cultural reference that lands flat. Native fluency plus professional judgment - knowing not just what the words mean but what they should become - is exactly what AI labs need across languages.
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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, not a limitation. AI labs need reviewers who can catch the specific error a model makes when translating 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.
Formal credentials like ATA certification, a court interpreter certification, or a sworn translator designation strengthen your profile and are verified during onboarding, but they are not a hard requirement. What matters is demonstrable professional practice: documented translation output, interpreting work, or localization experience that shows you have operated at a professional level in your language pair.
Most work is evaluative. You will review AI-generated translations for accuracy, register, idiomatic correctness, and cultural appropriateness, much like a post-editor or QA reviewer rather than a primary translator. Some tasks ask you to demonstrate how you would handle a specific passage yourself so a model can learn from your reasoning, but you are not being hired to produce client-ready deliverables.
Interpreting experience qualifies. Conference interpreters, court-certified interpreters, community interpreters, and ASL or BSL interpreters bring distinct fluency and real-time language transfer skills that written-translation reviewers do not. If demand for your specific modality is lower at a given time, your profile remains active for both translation review tasks and conversational or interview-format work where live language judgment is the point.
The work does not require you to share client materials, proprietary documents, or any content covered by an existing professional obligation. All tasks use purpose-built or synthetic content provided by Terac and the AI lab, not documents from your current or past clients. You review and annotate that content under a standard non-disclosure agreement, which is consistent with professional ethics frameworks like those of ATA, AIIC, and most state court interpreter programs.
Why your expertise matters
Translation and linguistics expertise is critical for frontier AI because models trained on multilingual corpora inherit subtle register mismatches, calque errors, and false-friend substitutions that only a working translator can reliably catch. Beyond surface fluency, a trained linguist can assess whether a model's output preserves pragmatic intent, respects genre conventions (legal, medical, literary), and handles morphologically complex languages like Arabic or Finnish without collapsing inflectional distinctions. That judgment is exactly what labs need when benchmarking multilingual models and building language-pair-specific evaluation rubrics.
How pay works
Rates toward the top of the $40-$110/hr band go to translators with domain specialization (legal, pharmaceutical, or financial), professional certification such as ATA credentials or EN 17100 qualification, and demonstrated experience in lower-resource language pairs where fewer qualified reviewers exist. All work is fully remote and paid by the verified hour, meaning your time is compensated once Terac confirms task completion rather than on a per-word or per-project basis typical in traditional translation 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 a GPT-4o English-to-Portuguese legal translation for register accuracy, identifying calque errors and false cognates that would mislead a native reader.
- Score a set of machine-translated pharmaceutical package inserts against the source using MQM error typology, flagging mistranslations that create patient safety risk.
- Write three contrastive worked examples showing how an expert handles untranslatable cultural references in Japanese-to-English literary text, explaining the reasoning at each decision point.
- Evaluate whether a model's Spanish output correctly distinguishes formal and informal second-person address (usted vs. tú) across a set of customer-service dialogues.
- Annotate a corpus of AI-generated subtitles for a French documentary, marking segmentation errors, over-long reading times, and loss of speaker register.
- Create a reference translation from scratch in your native language for a prompt set that will serve as a gold-standard benchmark for 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
