Technology has transformed communication —  from the uptake of telegraphs in the 19th century to the ability of today’s machine learning software to instantly produce speech-to-text captioning in dozens of languages — and in many ways has brought people together across languages. At Sorenson, we’d argue that technology is a tool for interlingual communication, but it cannot yet match skilled interpreters for linguistic and expressive nuance.

Sign language interpreters are in high demand, and that’s great because:

1. It’s a sign of greater communication accessibility between deaf and hearing people
2. It means more job opportunities for sign language interpreters

Every certified sign language interpreter is part of a relatively small force trying to make a dent in an enormous need:

• In the U.S., there are just over 10-thousand certified ASL interpreters¹ compared to roughly one million Deaf and hard-of-hearing adults who use sign language.²
• While approximately 87-thousand Deaf people in the UK use sign language,³ the country has only 1,500 registered sign language interpreters.⁴
• The Canadian Association of Sign Language Interpreters has about 830 members,⁵ to support 357-thousand Deaf Canadians.⁶

If you’re exploring your options in a career as a sign language interpreter or looking for interpreting jobs, you can be choosy about where you take your skills. Here are some considerations to guide the next steps in your sign language interpreting career.

Key factors to consider in choosing the next steps in your sign language interpreting career

When planning any career move, some factors are obvious — like compensation and schedule — but those essential considerations are a fraction of the impact on your career and job satisfaction.

• Professional development
• Freelance versus employee
• Benefits and compensation
• Variety of opportunities

For interpreters in particular, professional development and continuing education are essential to keeping your skills sharp and opening doors to additional opportunities, whether you want to compare VRS and community interpreting or gain skills and knowledge in specialty areas like medical, legal, or educational settings.

Professional development

In the interpreting world, “knowledge is power” applies to both what you know (continuing education) and whom you know (networking). When plotting a course in your career, think about what kind of access each of your options will provide to training and connections for professional growth.

Continuing education 

The most seasoned and skilled sign language interpreters never stop learning — about techniques, dialects, and evolution of the living languages they work with. It is a professional necessity for interpreters to further their education long beyond completion of their initial interpreter education courses by way of advanced degrees, continuing education courses, and training.

How you approach ongoing professional learning roughly breaks down into two options:

1. You can independently pursue degree programs or enroll in interpreter CEU courses like those available through Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) or a number of companies specializing in language services and education. You’ll find a wide variety of interpreting CEUs (continuing education units), many of which you can complete fully online. You’ll be responsible for the registration costs.
2. If you’re an employee/staff interpreter, your company or organization may offer its own educational or training opportunities, contract with a third party to provide training, or cover the costs for interpreters to enroll in external continuing education courses.

Interpreter education and training opportunities are arguably Sorenson’s biggest impact in the global languages services realm because not only does the company offer complimentary professional development for its thousands of interpreting employees, its interpreter programs also train interpreters who aren’t Sorenson staff.

Sorenson Interpreting Academy provided more than 40-thousand hours of instruction in 2023 alone with 16-thousand participant registrations in its programs for every level from students through experienced professionals.

The mission of these programs is to enhance the skills of Sorenson’s own exceptional interpreters, of course, but also to enrich the sign language interpreting community as a whole through quality professional development opportunities:

• Deaf Interpreter Academy is a no-cost program offering professional-level trainings for new and working Deaf interpreters in the industry and provide skill development opportunities to all interpreters in Deaf-hearing interpreter teaming techniques.
• Compass is also a no-cost program that builds on the linguistic and cultural foundations of heritage language users to fast-track their sign language interpreting education.
• Interpreters with strong potential who don’t yet meet Sorenson’s rigorous standards for employment enroll by the hundreds every year in the company’s Connections program to take their skills to the next level, and 98% say they would recommend the program to others.

The dozens of interpreter educators who comprise the Sorenson Interpreting Academy team include veteran sign language interpreters — many of whom are Deaf interpreters and Codas — sharing  expertise in language development, instructional design and content, as well as mentoring. 

Mentorship and networking 

Meeting and working with fellow interpreters is a chance to borrow skills, build confidence, and open doors to career advancement; sign language interpreting is a small world, after all.

1. Working with more experienced interpreters can develop mentor relationships that allow you to benefit from years of practice and skill-building as well as constructive feedback.
2. Meeting and mentoring younger interpreters can be fulfilling, and don’t overlook the potential to learn from them as well. As sign languages evolve, fresh interpreters may be current on the latest slang.
3. Professional organizations and conferences are a networking goldmine. You may want to weigh how different employment scenarios would impact your ability to participate.

The size of your interpreting team plays a significant role in your mentoring and networking opportunities, whether you’re interpreting for a large language services provider, a small staff, or flying solo as a freelancer.

For example, Sorenson is the largest private employer of sign language interpreters in the world with a team of more than 5,000 interpreters globally. One of the benefits of being part of an interpreter workforce of that size is the potential to learn from peers with an astounding variety of expertise:

• Deaf interpreters
• Trilingual interpreters
• Interpreters with specialized training for DeafBlind and low vision interpreting, medical, legal, and government settings
• Every interpreting setting in the industry: VRS, on-site, scheduled and on-demand VRI

Your level of exposure to other interpreters — as mentors, mentees, and professional connections — may influence your decision to pursue interpreting work as an employee or freelance.

Freelance vs. Employee

Are you going to be better off going solo as a freelance interpreter or finding a position with a company that offers sign language interpreting? There’s not a right or wrong answer; it comes down to what factors are most important to you. As with any industry, freelance vs. staff interpreting come with pros and cons, many of them relating to flexibility and support.

Freelance interpreting 

Pros: As a freelance sign language interpreter, you have the maximum level of control and flexibility; you can choose your hours and what kind of interpreting work you book. That flexibility allows you to customize your work schedule. You may also be able to negotiate your rates to reflect your experience, specialization, or other market factors.

Cons: The flip side of freelance interpreting can be additional responsibility and instability. You’re responsible not only  for securing interpreting work, but arranging your own insurance, training and certifications and licensure as required, and handling the administrative side of the business — invoicing, bookkeeping, and taxes.

There are a couple basic options to find freelance interpreting work: 

• Independently, through self-marketing and networking: If you’re well-connected and establish relationships with organizations or individuals that regularly require interpreting, this approach may run smoothly. Without those relationships, marketing yourself can require a lot of leg work.
• Work with a language services provider: The company fields interpreting requests and connects them with a pool of freelance interpreters. This setup removes the burden of marketing yourself, but opportunities may be inconsistent.

Staff interpreting

Pros: A major benefit of an employee interpreting position is the stability of consistent work and pay. As a staff interpreter, you may also have company-provided benefits like health insurance, retirement plans, and paid time off (though this is not guaranteed, particularly for part-time interpreting positions). Some employers who maintain interpreting staff will also offer professional development opportunities.

Cons: Some staff interpreting positions do offer more flexibility than a standard corporate environment, but do not always offer as much as freelancing. Being an employee means answering to management and operating within the confines of company expectations. Also, as an employee, your ability to negotiate your rates is likely limited to your hiring and potentially annual reviews.

Your experience as an employee will vary by your setting — whether you’re a staff interpreter for a private enterprise, a government agency or educational institution, or are an employee interpreter with a language services provider. While many language service providers operate exclusively with freelancers, there are few exceptions like Sorenson, which maintains a dedicated staff of thousands of interpreter employees.

Benefits and compensation

Interpreting is one of those coveted careers where you can make a real difference in people’s day and make the world a little better. That said, warm, fuzzy feelings don’t pay the bills. You can prioritize making an impact on your community and also care about your compensation.

To get a baseline for competitive pay, you can use online databases to look up the average sign language interpreter income nationally and in your area. For example, if you look up estimates of national average sign language interpreting salaries, you may find numbers like these:

• Average ASL interpreter salary in the U.S. around $64,000/year (from ZipRecruiter.com)
• Average BSL interpreter salary in the U.K. around £35,000 (from Talent.com)
• Average sign language interpreter salary in Canada around $70,000 (from Talent.com)

Bear in mind, what you can expect for a sign language interpreter salary will vary considerably by experience, certifications, location, and specialization. There can also be significant differences in interpreter income between employee positions versus freelance work, and that’s partly due to additional factors like benefits and taxes.

When weighing compensation for different career options, you may want to think about what you’re likely to get in a week, in a year, and in the long run. This is particularly important when considering freelance vs. employee interpreting paths.

• Negotiating rates: As we discussed above, freelance interpreting offers the most opportunity to negotiate your rates, which can significantly impact your earning potential, especially if you have in-demand specialization or experience (or if you’re in an area where the need for interpreting services exceeds availability).
  However, if you don’t have the credentials yet to command top tier rates, if the demand for interpreting doesn’t give you leverage in negotiations, or if you’re not consistently booking work independently you may want to compare the average rate for freelance interpreting to the total compensation you could earn in a staff position.
• Health insurance: Health insurance can be expensive. If you’re responsible for your own insurance, you’ll want to price policies to factor that into your income calculations. Likewise, health insurance benefits can add thousands of dollars a year to the value of a compensation package from an employer.
• Retirement savings: Retirement is where long-term compensation considerations really come into play. Much like insurance, if you opt to work freelance as an interpreter, you’ll need to look into independently setting up and contributing to a retirement savings account and planning for that money to come out of your earnings.
  If you choose an employee interpreting position, retirement benefits do increase the value of your compensation package, but the amount may vary greatly; compare employers’ retirement contributions and/or matching as part of your evaluation of offers.

Review Sorenson employee benefits

Variety of interpreting opportunities

If you could only do one type of sign language interpreting for the rest of your career, what would it be? VRS, community interpreting, scheduled VRI, on-demand VRI? Would it be a specialized service like legal interpreting or DeafBlind interpreting? Can’t choose just one, or haven’t tried them all to know for sure? 

When plotting where to steer your career, factor in how important it is to you to have a variety of interpreting opportunities.

Video Remote Interpreting (VRI):

VRI has skyrocketed in popularity as an enterprise service. For interpreters, scheduled VRI combines the remote video interpreting aspect of VRS with the slower pace and greater potential for prep of community interpreting. The relatively recent introduction of on-demand VRI skews toward a quicker pace for short conversations in an enterprise environment.

Video Relay Service (VRS):

It’s tough, it’s rewarding, and it generates the biggest demand for sign language interpreters. VRS is fast-paced and unpredictable, allowing interpreters to connect sometimes dozens of conversations in a workday.

On-site/community interpreting:

On-site (or community) interpreting is often the option clients name as their favorite for the greater visibility, mobility, and elimination of technical difficulties. Those are equally beneficial for interpreters, though on-site work does require travel, which can include dealing with traffic, parking, and checking in at the location.

Specialized interpreting:

The term “specialized interpreting” casts a wide net and can refer to interpreting needs that require niche skills, additional training, or techniques to fit particular situations or content — like interpreting emergency government news conferences or theater performances. Most often, specialized interpreting falls into three high-demand categories:

• Legal interpreting: Legal interpreting can encompass court proceedings, conversations between attorneys and clients, as well as law enforcement interviews and investigations. It’s another area of specialization that requires specific skills and terminology.
• Medical interpreting: Medical settings are one of the highest needs for specialized interpreters, both in person and VRI. Medical interpreting requires additional knowledge of medical terminology as well as compliance with state and institutional policies relating to safety and privacy.
• Educational interpreting: There’s steady demand for educational interpreters in primary, secondary, and higher education. With more deaf children attending mainstream schools and deaf college enrollment growing at a faster rate than that of hearing peers, the need for sign language interpreting at all levels of education has never been higher. In fact, in the U.S., the National Deaf Center points out that higher education is one of the sectors most keenly feeling the shortage of sign language interpreters as universities struggle to keep pace with the influx of deaf students.⁷

Traditionally, educational interpreting has been largely on-site, but the increase in remote learning has created a need for VRI in education as well.

Those are only a few examples. Specialized interpreting can also include different approaches to interpreting to better meet the linguistic needs of clients, like low vision interpreting or interpreter teaming with a hearing interpreter and a Deaf interpreter.

• Certified Deaf Interpreters: If you’re a Deaf interpreter who’s gone through the necessary training to become certified (or plan to), you’re well-versed in interpreter teaming (or you will be). Even for interpreters with native language proficiency, teaming is a skill in itself, and it takes training and practice for Deaf and hearing interpreters to collaborate seamlessly. That’s one of the key elements of Sorenson’s Deaf Interpreter Academy, a no-cost program for Deaf interpreters to hone their skills and build a foundation for professional interpreting success.

To acquire the training required for specialized interpreting, you’ll need to enroll for continuing education programs/courses and training.

Some companies that employ interpreters will provide the necessary training for interpreters to maintain their certifications and licensure. Sorenson is unique in the size and scope of its interpreting and interpreter training teams that it offers wide range of professional development for its staff at no cost to boost the pool of qualified interpreters for any need. Interpreters may even get reimbursement for related costs like testing fees, registration for professional conferences, and interpreting organization membership.

Design your own sign language interpreter career

The biggest takeaway from this guide is that you have options as a professional sign language interpreter. Demand is high for your skill set, and a global shortage of interpreters means you have the power to be selective about your career moves.

There’s not a one-size-fits-all path to suit every interpreter. Weigh your priorities and preferences from the factors we’ve laid out here, talk to mentors and peers about their experiences, and research your options.

Sorenson is always hiring sign language interpreters to support connection and language equity on a global scale. We encourage you to browse our interpreting opportunities and interpreter training opportunities to advance your career.

Browse Sorenson sign language interpreter positions

Sources

1. Dive into your exclusive access to RID publications and materials.
2. How many people use Sign Language? A national health survey-based estimate
3. Prevalence of British Sign Language
4. Facts and statements on inclusion
5. Casli directory of members
6. Statistics on deaf Canadians
7. The ASL interpreter shortage and its impact on accessibility in college settings