Maybe translation of ancient texts.

Look into a US State Department Foreign Service Officer position. There are many opportunities in many countries.
Here is a link to info on the FSO program.

“Any analysis of language, including 8th-grade grammar, can be called linguistics. As recently as 200 years ago, ordinary grammar was about the only kind of linguistics there was. Today a linguist may be a person who learns foreign languages, but the term usually refers to people who devote themselves to analyzing the structure of language. Many linguists concentrate on the history of a language; others study the way children learn to speak; others analyze the sounds of a language—and still others just study English grammar, a subject so big that you could easily spend your entire life on it.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/linguistics There should be those types of jobs available in universities.

When i just did a job search for linguistics, they were all translation positions in various languages. if you want a translator job you must be proficient (read very fluent) in a foreign language. You would be translating from that language back to English.

I had one friend who was a linguist, and her goal was to become proficient in several languages. I am not sure what job she was shooting for, but with those skills, she would be sought after in the job sector.

Banking.

I had a friend that spoke a couple of languages and worked at an attorneys office translating for the for non-English speaking clients.

Linguistics (and being a linguist) is not the same as being a language speaker. A linguist is knowledgeable about word patterns, grammar, tenses, etc., and how they work together to make language communicate effectively.

Most of the responses above deal with people who speak a lot of different languages, but say nothing about the structure of the languages they speak.

I don’t think there is a job for just a linguist. It is in conjunction with something else, for example:
forensic linguistics
historical linguistics
written linguistic patterns
juvenile linguistic patterns and learning
comparative linguistics

So the question really has to turn to – to what field will the students who are studying linguistics today, apply their skills ?

Government jobs and Military

It’s important to understand that linguistics does not mean learning a lot of languages. What it means is the study of the history and structure of language. It’s the science of language development and structure. Linguists may be polyglots but one has little to do with the other.

It would be cool to work for Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, or even Nuance (the maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking) to improve their voice recognition and translation technologies (speech-to-text, for example). If you can combine it with artificial intelligence, that would be even better.