I heard it’s drying up due to the increased ability if computer translations. I’ve heard only anecdotal evidence. Anyone else have insight on this trend?
My bestie was doing freelance translation back in 2018-2019. You could try signing up with freelance sites to get a start (though I guess it isn’t full time). Have you been searching in Japanese online too for open positions?
Most translation work in Japan have gone to freelance/offshore. Generally speaking, Japanese companies no longer sponsor work visas.
Payment for general translations have dropped to unlivable fees—less than ¥3 yen per word because of offshoring and machine translation. Super technical and legal translations still pay enough money for an **expert** to make a living but there are no places for a new translator to start out and slo-o-o-o-wly learn to be an expert.
Like others have said, it’s going to become much more difficult from now on. You’ll still need people doing localization and entertainment/fiction-related translation of course, but MT is really taking over more technical translation. Even where I’m working now, we’re struggling to find people that are knowledgeable and experienced enough, but at the same time we’re mostly relying on our huge database of translation memories and AI-based machine translation making it difficult for new people to actually get the experience we’re looking for. Doesn’t help that rates keep going down on all sides and businesses trying to find ways to stop outsourcing altogether.
Not saying it’s impossible yet by the way, but I do recommend specializing and making lasting connections as soon as you can. Also, just looking for random translation jobs is always going to be tricky. Really spend some time on thinking what type of material you actually want to translate and start researching from there. No technical translation gig will care one bit if you did even years of game localization, but neither will localization companies when it comes to technical translation experience.
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I heard it’s drying up due to the increased ability if computer translations. I’ve heard only anecdotal evidence. Anyone else have insight on this trend?
My bestie was doing freelance translation back in 2018-2019. You could try signing up with freelance sites to get a start (though I guess it isn’t full time). Have you been searching in Japanese online too for open positions?
Most translation work in Japan have gone to freelance/offshore. Generally speaking, Japanese companies no longer sponsor work visas.
Payment for general translations have dropped to unlivable fees—less than ¥3 yen per word because of offshoring and machine translation. Super technical and legal translations still pay enough money for an **expert** to make a living but there are no places for a new translator to start out and slo-o-o-o-wly learn to be an expert.
Like others have said, it’s going to become much more difficult from now on. You’ll still need people doing localization and entertainment/fiction-related translation of course, but MT is really taking over more technical translation. Even where I’m working now, we’re struggling to find people that are knowledgeable and experienced enough, but at the same time we’re mostly relying on our huge database of translation memories and AI-based machine translation making it difficult for new people to actually get the experience we’re looking for. Doesn’t help that rates keep going down on all sides and businesses trying to find ways to stop outsourcing altogether.
Not saying it’s impossible yet by the way, but I do recommend specializing and making lasting connections as soon as you can. Also, just looking for random translation jobs is always going to be tricky. Really spend some time on thinking what type of material you actually want to translate and start researching from there. No technical translation gig will care one bit if you did even years of game localization, but neither will localization companies when it comes to technical translation experience.