I’m half Japanese, doing a liberal arts major(not linguistics) fully in English at a Japanese university. I’ve always liked studying languages, reading and doing language workbooks since I was little, so I feel like translating would be a good fit for me. A professor in one of my classes got me to do some translation work(Jap->Eng) and I do like it. The professor seemed to like my work. Are there any gigs a somewhat bilingual student can jump straight into, or are licenses or studying required beforehand?
3 comments
You’re half Japanese and capable of translation work but can’t Google that for yourself? I’m smelling something fishy… And it’s not the aji the boy caught on his most recent fishing trip…
unfortunately no, there’s no requirements. any idiot (I don’t mean you) can call themselves a translator and do translation work. actually finding work with limited experience will be slightly different but also not impossible. worst case you can fudge your years of experience a little bit, it’s not like anyone will really check that.
a) please dont use ‘Jap’. I’m assuming you’re from Hong Kong, but..yeah, don’t use it. It’s a slur.
b) You’re still in uni, which means you don’t know shit yet (sorry, but it’s true). Which means you’d be a generalist translator. Hate to break it to you, but many AI translation engines trained on reasonably robust parallel text translation corpus will already be better than you at translation, and a *whole lot faster and a whole lot cheaper*.
c) The only way to make money in translation is to be a subject matter expert, and translate in that field. In other words – it’s not enough to ‘know Japanese and English’ to be a J-E or E-J translator, you actually need to have something to say. Finance, pharma, legal etc are good fields. But I’m honestly not convinced even those fields won’t be largely dominated by AI, with subject matter experts focused more on helping *build* the AI engines (ie, you’ll need to be an expert in your field, and understand neural machine translation technology and programming, etc.
d) If you still want to get into translation (J->E) the best advice I can give you is to work on your English writing ability, as that’s the main difference between the good and great translators.