So I am currently in the middle of applying for jobs and have a few interviews lined up. In one of the jobs, it states that I will have a Japanese to English and vice versa test section. For anyone who has had something like this, have you had to handwrite it or have they let you use a computer to type?
I ask this, because I have no problem speaking, reading, or listening, but writing off the top of my head is something I’m not good at. I can read around 2000 kanji, but I’ll be lucky if I can write 200 of the top of my head.
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Type. Just real quick… are you familiar with the workflow of translating? You should only be translating into your native language. I’m sure they’re going to ask you which CAT you use – Trados, MemQ, etc.
Most companies will ask you to do it on a computer, but I once had to do a handwritten translation both ways. I wrote all the Japanese in romaji, since it would have take too long to do it in hiragana at the time. It wasn’t an issue.
Unless writing is part of the job description, no worries that it’d be tested. If it is, kind of a red flag.
If they ask you to handwrite stuff – walk out of the interview; you’ll probably be asked to review work assignments sent over via fax.
It’s been *years* since I had to do a translation test (like….early 90’s?) but even back then, it was on a laptop.
Good luck!
We did it for a couple of jobs in my department because we had to have people that could summarize M&A transactions in English and they’d primarily be reading Japanese as the source. They would have to do something very specific to that topic on a pc. This was also before GT was any good in J to E anyway.
Friend had to summarize a 10-page English regulatory document. They didn’t want a translation, they wanted a Japanese brief/summarization, so it was interesting because it was a combination of reading comp, domain knowledge, and writing ability. She had overnight to do that. Also before GT.
Since you have clarified that this is an IT position, this is my experience with English/Japanese test that I took as part of interview process for some IT positions.
– Very few companies actually have a test, usually if you can handle the interview in English and/or Japanese, that is good enough.
– The companies that do have tests tend to be on the bigger side, and English/Japanese tests usually are held online, along with personality tests and logical thinking tests. Of the top of my head, the one that required me to take language tests were ANA (as the carrier), Macnica, IIJ,…
– The tests were very similar to TOEIC test for English and JLPT for Japanese. They were multi-choices question tests, but were shorter. I don’t think any of those took more than 30 minutes.
– There was no speaking, writing or listening test. Everything was done online.
– A special case was when I applied for a Bridge system engineer role. The test was to write an email to inform a customer that a project was running late, and beg them for forgiveness lol. Even in that case I can still use computer though.
I handwrote the translation test I took when joining a company… in 1999, when the average non-Japanese person didn’t have a computer capable of entering Japanese, and there was no guarantee that one person’s encoding would be readable on the other side.
I can’t imagine having to handwrite today, and your reading-to-writing ratio isn’t that much worse than plenty of young Japanese people. Let the computer convert the kanji for you.