Developing good research skills is vital. When you translate something, you become an expert in whatever that is. The ability to thoroughly research topics, even the most seemingly insignificant details, is also very important. You should know about politics, history, technology, etc as well, depending on the work you end up doing. For some people this seems like a dream come true, but remember, this doesn't just mean pop culture news. Not only do you have to continue studying Japanese for the entirety of this career, but you'll probably need to be current with just about everything that's going on in Japan. If you've been looking forward to the day when you finally get to stop researching, learning and studying, this is not the job for you. A delay on your end could slow down an entire project and halt the work other people need to do. In most cases you will be translating for a person or company who needs the finished product by a specific date. Procrastination, while something most perfectionists suffer from, cannot hold you back from meeting deadlines. In this world, deadlines can be everything. If you tend to lose focus or procrastinate, you will have a really hard time meeting deadlines while producing the level of product you're being paid for. Many translators are either freelancers or work for third-party employers, so being able to manage and dedicate enough time to get large jobs done is essential. You also need to be able to sit down and concentrate for hours at a time. If you're the kind of person who says, "Eh, close enough" and settles for second best, this probably isn't the career for you. That means you're getting paid for the English you put out, so it better be good.īeing a perfectionist helps because you need to be able to be extremely meticulous. For native English speakers, you're probably only going to be translating into English. This means that even if you're great at Japanese, if you slept through high school English, you'll have a really hard time being a translator. You also can't really get by with just spoken fluency – you need to be able to read and write well in BOTH languages. You need to know two languages, and if you're reading this, those are probably English and Japanese. If you've been thinking about becoming a Japanese > English translator there a few things you need to know. Is Becoming a Japanese Translator Right For You? Source: LWYang Many translators end up doing more than one, if not all three, in their careers so it's important to remember that they are all intertwined. This guide will mainly focus on translation because most of the information and skills you need to translate overlap with interpretation and language localization. This can be between two people, or many people, and can be a very stressful, fast paced environment. Interpretation is oral translation in real time. Localization includes multimedia such as video games, manga, anime, websites, and software. Translation is just one part to localization, and when people say "I want to be a translator!" this might actually be what they mean. Localization is the adaptation of something in one language to be easily understood to a different, specific language/culture/locale. Translation would involve changing any of the following to Japanese or English: manuals, websites, contracts, brochures, instructions, presentations, etc. If you're in academia is could mean literature and short stories. Translation is rendering one language to another language. But first, let's go over the "what." The Big Three Translation Types Hopefully it can clear up some misconceptions on what exactly Japanese to English translation is, what jobs opportunities there are, what the work is like, and more. How do I become a Japanese translator? That's a question we get a lot here at Tofugu and I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people to finally bring you this guide. It wasn't until my last semester that my advisor helped me do an independent study where I was able to translate a short story, that I finally took my first step into that world. There were no true translation classes at my college and it seemed that no one could tell me where to start or even where to go from here. But after taking countless classes and bothering my Japanese professors, I hadn't gotten very far. I liked literature, I liked reading, oh geez, I did want to be a translator after all. But the more I said it, the more I started to believe myself. Ah yes, they would say, that sounds like a responsible adult job. My default answer became, "Oh, I'm going to be a translator," because it got people off my back. To be honest, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted to learn the language and study Japanese culture. When I was in college and declared my major as Japanese Studies, people constantly asked me what I was going to do with it.
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