So, I'm back to learning Japanese after a 3 year hiatus. Long story short I passed JLPT1 in 2011 then did computer science at uni for 3 years and now I'm working in an international software company in my home country who have clients in Japan. So I do software development as well as working on translation / localization for the Japanese market and translating correspondence from Japan to our office and giving replies in Japanese to emails where necessary.

This week we had executive level guys come from Japan for a 3 day meeting to discuss strategy for an implementation project on a new deal and I had to interpret almost the entire time. I felt like the first day it was insane pressure but by the 3rd day it was just normal.

It was an interesting experience because I'm very fluent and can express anything I want to but it was challenging at times doing the interpreting because I've never talked about / read material related to how the Japanese electricity industry works (well...since I've started working at the company I have). So, extremely high level Japanese with lots of industry specific technical terms. I think 90% of the time I was fine but there was one scene where we discussing specific details of exactly how one client wanted to do something and that involved a deep knowledge of the market works to understand even in English, let alone Japanese, so I just couldn't get what was being said for 10 mins haha. The rest was all good except for about 2 ~ 3 other times.

Overall though... I felt a lot more confident doing it by day 3 and I realised something pretty sweet. I'm edging more towards the management side of things and I realised that being the only guy in my office that speaks Japanese when we're trying to win massive deals in Japan puts me right in the boardroom with the top level execs gaining awesome exposure to how the core business works. Which is kind of an unexpected perk of having learned Japanese.

Anyway... long story short... I'm now absolutely studying my butt off to pick up all these technical terms related to the electricity industry in Japanese (and English for that matter) so I can start really kicking ass.

Anyone else have experiences interpreting?

You missed mentioning a huge perk which is networking. Those execs now know you.

Well, congratulations mezbup. It's always good to get in front of the senior people and to be known by them.

john555 Wrote:It's always good to get in front of the senior people and to be known by them.

Especially when you're doing something useful; the worst thing you can be in a company is expendable, because you'll get replaced as soon as something bad happens; even the management aren't safe from this (though they tend to get pressured to leave instead of fired).

Congratulations from me as well.
Listening is one of my weakest skills, so interpretation is impossible for me at the moment. I've done a bit of translation for individuals, but that's always text.

[Zgarbas]

Interpreting is crazy hard, congratulations on managing so well on your first gig!

My first interpreting gig was also in the technical field, and would often get lost due to the excessive jargon. Luckily, Japanese people tend to be very understanding when it comes to this and don't really scoff at explaining rather than interpreting technical details (this would be unacceptable in any language to English, though). Good luck with your studies!

What got me was that I had learned all the technical terms related to my company (both in Romanian and Japanese... stuff like debitmeters tend to not pop up in daily conversation much), but often new clients would be from a different field so I was faced with a lot of jargon that I wasn't prepared for. I found it really useful to read the wiki articles in japanese for those things later on to see what kind of new terms I can expect to pop-up (for example, i had this one client refer to Newton's laws of motion to explain how their product works, so I found it useful to read about Newton's laws in japanese and Romanian later on). I also had to learn the fine differences which don't normally pop-up, e.g. By chance I knew the word 濾過 and used it as I'd learned it as meaning filtration, but my boss explained that there are multiple types of filtration and 濾過 is just one of them. Also remember that most universities in the STEM field focus a lot on English, so even though they don't speak English they most likely had to learn the terms in (katakanized) English as well, so they'll probably know them.

When it comes to Japanese I find interpreting easier than translation since mistakes don't matter so much as the meaning gets across; I'd have colleagues with poorer Japanese than mine that did well since they just shorthanded things, whereas I was really concerned with using proper Japanese. Written text is more strict.