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Honyakujoshua - My One Tip on Becoming a Professional Translator - HonyakuJoshua - 2015-02-10
I am a professional translator working from French to English nowadays.
My one tip for anyone graduating with a language degree would be to get a professional translator to teach them translation on the job, even if you have to pay for this service.
I never actually did this with Japanese because I was so pissed off with the tuition I received at University.
This is the one thing that really gave my career a boost.
Josh
Honyakujoshua - My One Tip on Becoming a Professional Translator - Zgarbas - 2015-02-10
Word (sort of). I started attending a Translations MA before dropping out and moving to Japan. (technically I was paid to go to University because free tuition) and though it was only one semester it did wonders for my knowledge of both Romanian, English, and translations. I think my life would've been very different had I understood the difference between reading English (translations) and reading English (Philology) when I chose my undergrad.
Honyakujoshua - My One Tip on Becoming a Professional Translator - FeloniousMonk - 2015-02-10
Agreed. It's difficult learning where to start off as a translator, and learning the business directly would definitely set you up a lot better for a career than trying to figure it all out on your own.
For what it's worth, I think the most valuable thing to do to improve the quality of your translation is to make sure that you get some creative writing experience. Lots of companies ask for it outright in their localization jobs, and having it will make you better situated when you get some work that's not asking for a 1:1 translation. The first few comics I worked on were all in the romance genre, and I was completely lost trying to find a voice that would appeal to the audience, especially after spending so long in the 'word-math' of technical documents.
Also, I think that if you think you might want to translate as a career, you should start practicing it, regardless of your level. Don't wait for 'permission' to do so. There's no reason you can't start practicing with children's books or four-panel comics relatively early in your language learning. At an intermediate level, you can switch to short news stories. Make a practice of picking out phrases from your favorite songs, and think about the 'best' way to capture them in your native language. Make notes of particularly interesting lines of dialogue you find in a translated game or comic, then check how it's written in the native text (the SNES-era Square games Ted Woolsey did are great for this). Do shadowing-style practice with foreign-language interviews, stopping every few sentences to translate/interpret what was said (lots of companies ask for interpreting experience in their translation positions, and you'll be pretty screwed otherwise if you're put on the spot to do it in an interview*).
Just some thoughts.
*happened to a friend
Honyakujoshua - My One Tip on Becoming a Professional Translator - HonyakuJoshua - 2015-02-10
Do you read that?
As beautiful message!
If somebody can decipher that for you, you know, and say what it means, get what it means, it'll upset you. You'll flip, I mean flip for real!
Honyakujoshua - My One Tip on Becoming a Professional Translator - FeloniousMonk - 2015-02-10
And the Epis'trophy' for deepest cut goes to...
Man, hadn't thought about that movie for years. Was bouncing back and forth from L1 to L2 pages when I wrote my reply, so I thought you were teasing me for being indecipherable (not unlike Monk half the time).