Hello. I’m looking for recommendations for skills I could learn to further my career. Any suggestions welcome.
*Also something that can be learnt without needing 8 hours per day since my free time is limited
*Not programming since I don’t think I’m suited for it.
Ideally, it would be something that falls into the following three categories (not listed in any particular order).
1. Something that would be beneficial for a translator (e.g specialist knowledge)
2. Something that would help you get a WFH job in Japan
3. Something that would be useful back in the UK.
Additional information:
I have N1 and work in a Japanese company for manual editing, but I don’t actually do the DTP. I don’t really have any notable skills or experience either, but I feel like I want to do something productive with the little amount of free time I have.
5 comments
UX design
Japan’s big on certifications. Not sure exactly what field you work in, but if there are any relevant certifications to your industry or an industry you have interest in, consider getting it.
Or even getting a certification for a side gig; I`ve been thinking of getting a tour guide certification for a while to maybe run some tours as a side gig…
For translation, there was a time that patent translation was considered lucrative. Japan Inc. requires thousands upon thousands of documents to be translated annually, with language that’s difficult for machine translation to achieve (look how invention claims are written, for example).
But this was 一昔前 and I don’t know how the market is now. Machine translation may be able to handle more documents with ease, there’s an increasing number of translators every year, and workflows might have shifted to churn out low-quality “good enough” translations, for example, so I don’t know how things are now.
I personally don’t work in translation (officially) now but translating “corporate” documents back then–esp. material related to investor relations and the like–definitely helped me shift to a corporate job.
Product Manager in a tech company. A lot of Japanese tech companies bring in foreigners but they don’t speak any Japanese so your language skills would give you a big competitive advantage.
It’s a design / project management discipline, you don’t need to be able to code. There’s a great Meetup community called ProductTank that meet every month if you want to learn more about this career.
Well, given the issues on global supply chains, I would learn about the specific vocabulary of this field as Japanese struggle a lot with english in logistics .