Give it a go. This is one of those things that I think you'll either be really gung ho about in the beginning and the excitement will fizzle out really quick and you'll lose interest or you will get started and get some traction and start moving in the right direction really quick. So either way I doubt you'll end up losing a lot of time one way or the other.

hm.. Well,my 2 cents. I have a japanese friend who was born in Canada but wasn't very good with japanese even though her family is japanese.  She ended up studying kanji during university, and afterwards moved to japan.  She started off as a translator even through her japanese wasn't 100%.  I'm not sure if she did it privately or through a company.  I'm guessing privately for people in the general population.  After 4 years of living there she came back being quite fluent and she said she learned along the way during her career there.  I'm not sure how comparable this is with your situation since she was in her 20's and she does live with a japanese family.  However, her language ability was general everyday vocabulary, nothing technical.  The technical terms came as she went along and she bought an electronic dictionary in japan to help her translate.  Oh I should mention that she joined the japanese cultural centre here in canada first during high school and started with odd translating jobs with japanese residents here first.

Last edited by Miyumera (2012 November 20, 1:04 am)

Do you enjoy translation? You don't get to decide what you translate based on your interests if you want to make a living, and it can be incredibly tedious at times, especially when the writer of the 原文 is a total hack who shouldn't be allowed near a pen/keyboard. Maybe another thing worth considering before making any commitments.

I say, give it a bash.  Set some goals,  spend a year, reassess progress, then reset goals.

I don't know much about translation, but I am at a similar stage in life to you.  If you can afford to spend the time exploring an interest, have a go. It may lead you where you want to go, or maybe somewhere completely different, or even nowhere in particular.  Hopefully you will know more Japanese than you did before.

Okay, let's face it: You're in your 50s, you can't read Japanese, you don't know the grammar, you don't have the opportunity to obtain a degree in translation studies or Japanese studies, you consider yourself a generalist, you are afraid of translation software and you want to become a professional self-employed translator within a few years. Doesn't look that good, sorry.

But you're right, translation is something one can well do into his or her 70s or even 80s. But know that it's going to be difficult. May I ask if you already have language learning experience besides your "baby Japanese"? It may take quite some time until you figure out which learning techniques work for you and to develop the habit of studying in a regular, efficacious fashion. JLPT N1 level is a minimum requirement, even if some folks claim that you can become a translator at N3 level. This is bull, sorry. Of course you can't, because you don't know the language then.

What did you do before? As someone already said, just understanding the language is not enough to become a translator. Translating means transposing what is written in the source text (Japanese), so that it sound utterly as if it had originally been written in target language (English). Due to the enormous linguistical AND cultural differences between the Japanese speaking world and the English speaking world, this is not an easy task. Just look at some Japanese advertisements and try to translate them literally... they will sound incredibly stupid.

If it is the profession itself, and not so much the language that seems attractive to you, what about studying another, easier language? You can also become a translator for French, Dutch or another language that is so much closer to English, linguistically and culturally. You state that you already know some Japanese due to your sojourn 20 years ago, but even if you learn another European language from scratch, it will be a much faster and easier progress than pursuing your Japanese.

You seem to have a pretty good grasp of the situation, and you're right that you should probably try learning for at least 6 months plus before re-evaluating a little bit. A lot of people who become good translators don't necessarily set out with that as a plan, they end up moving into translation once they already have good skills and are looking for a way to exploit them. It is a long-term goal. If you consider the fact that a large number of students study Japanese full-time at university for 3-4 years and even after that time I suspect that only a very small proportion of them are near the level required to move straight into translation.

Your friend is right that some translators don't have the best speaking ability; that's true for both native Japanese and native English speakers. However I don't think that ignoring kanji for a year is necessarily a great idea (unless maybe you could put yourself in an environment completely surrounded by spoken Japanese). A certain degree of spoken Japanese is important to be able to deal with clients, but if your reading ability isn't good enough then you've got no chance.

@ mutley and thistime,
Thanks for your comments. I think my friend's advice could work. It kind of worked for me years ago but it is true my accent was not that good for quite some time though I was nearly always understood. One needs good friends who are prepared to pick up one'sbad romaji induced accents. This get tiresome even for the best of friends.

For me,  I am not sure it work would this time anyway. I would always be glancing over at Kanji and thus getting diverted not going down one road nor the other. Given my aim, some intensive study/revision of hiragana, katakana and RTK might only cost me a 3 month delay. On my time scale -what of it.

I have been reading the posts about writing kanji. I have dabbled a bit with RTK to see if I could work with it. One unexpected pleasure for me it the feeling of artistic achievment. I am crap at all the things I would like to be good at, dancing, singing and painting. Writing a nice kanji (with RTK help) is very satisfying for a artistic dork like me.

Last edited by nemuro (2012 November 29, 8:52 am)

[I'm veering off topic with this post. If it continues, perhaps it should be in a different thread .]

Tzadeck, I looked into this a bit when it came up a couple years ago. The strong impression I got from those readings was that it is true. 'Orthographic interference' does occur. If you have some credible information to the contrary, I'd be very interested to read it. (You seem to comment that orthography makes absolutely no difference every time the topic comes up, so I take it you have strong opinions/information on the issue?)

I don't think your linking to 'Making Sense of Japanese' on this issue is particularly helpful. I don't think you'll find much to support his offhand(?) remarks about kanji. I think he sometimes aims more for the entertainment of strong personal opinion rather than accuracy of information.

The sarcastic response that pops up -  "Well, I learned with romaji, so I guess my Japanese is eternally crippled. lol."  - isn't very meaningful. First, no one claims that using romaji will adversely affect every learner; it will depend on 1st language, learning methods, exposure, etc. Also, some people who are initially affected by it can improve their pronunciation and accents in different ways, if they want to work at it.

The idea is that it's possible to avoid the demonstrated risk, so why wouldn't folks attempt to do that? It's not the huge problem that the overreactions of some folks online would suggest, but I don't think taking an equally extreme position in the other direction is a good solution.

The response that absolute beginners will have to use romaji to initially learn the kana tables also isn't a strong argument. It's not difficult to emphasize the sounds when learning. Romaji can be avoided completed in learning kana or used to show how the grid works, but not relied on in practice. A similar eg would be teachers who use romaji to explain certain verb conjugations, but don't have their students use it for reading.

Even if students are taught precisely how romaji does not represent the actual pronunciation and can produce those sounds in isolated exercises, when they engage in reading where they are concentrating on other aspects (kanji readings, intonation, work meaning, rhythm, pitch accent, etc) they will often revert to mispronunciation caused by script interference.

Students from different native languages have difficulty with different sounds. This is quite apparent in classes of multinational students. Some of this is related to how the sounds in the language differ, but some is related to script. [Romaji based on English sounds can result in even more distorted sounds for some non-English speakers. Script is related to rhythm problems, as well. Some] experienced teachers say avoiding romaji helps reduce those script-related differences. There's also theory and experiments on the effects of script interference.

I wonder what sort of empirical results you would require and whether such an expectation is reasonable?

Some programs are specifically designed to be oral/aural and provide romaji transcripts as a reference only. I see some merit in this approach for folks needing to acquire spoken skills quickly or who have no plans to pursue the language beyond a temporary stay in Japan. Unfortunately, many students rely on those transcripts in ways not intended by the author/method. The romaji in grammar notes in those programs is unavoidable.

I think it'd be more helpful to stress the importance of using audio to develop improved pronunciation at the outset (and ideally get some native feedback), than to to deny the significance of script in foreign language [pronunciation]. They say that accent is the hardest aspect of language to change once engrained.

This only touches on script interference. There are other benefits to learning with kana rather than romaji.
Edits in [].

Last edited by Thora (2012 November 29, 4:39 pm)

On a related note, and considering that English isn't my native language, when I was learning the Kana, I started to pronounce unknown English words with Japanese phonetics, this is the reason why I totally dislike Roomaji.

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 November 30, 1:40 am)