Hindsight Is Always 20/20

During the last year of our bachelor’s degree, and to help us perhaps decide what master's degree to choose the following year, we were assigned to pair up and interview people exercising their profession in a field of our interest.

My teammate and I were mulling the idea of doing a Translation master's. Keen and eager to get all the information we could about a profession that had piqued our interest and curiosity, we quickly found two translators to conduct our interviews with.

The first one was an older, Italian lady. She was had built herself a solid reputation over the many years she had been working as a freelance translator, so she was well-known and financially stable.

The second one was a Japanese woman. She was young and was barely getting started in the profession. As opposed to the Italian lady, she was working at a translation agency to make ends meet, since she hadn’t built herself a reputation that would allow her to afford working exclusively as a freelance translator at the time just yet.

The differences between a well-established professional versus a rookie were blatant. Although my teammate and I sort of already knew, or at least were mildly aware of many things they both told us about the profession itself, hearing it directly from the horse’s mouth made everything so much more tangible in a way. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience, to say the least.

Even though all this happened almost 10 years ago, I constantly think about everything they told us and everything we learned that day.

Here's the gist of the things that stuck with me the most: 

• Being a translator is a lonely profession. You have to accept the fact that even if you have a network of fellow translators you can rely on, it is mostly a very lonely, no-contact-with-other-people kind of job. Unless you work at an agency or office you have to go to everyday (and even then you wouldn’t be doing much talking if you want to be productive), you basically spend days and weeks on end locked up home, typing away. 

• You must be organized, or else you won’t motivate yourself to ever start working, since you’re your own boss and no one will tell you to get started unless you do so yourself. 

• You need to have an innate sense of curiosity since you’ll almost always be asked to translate things about fields you know nothing about and you will obviously have to do some research on. 

• You have to be open-minded as far as the type of work that comes your way, because not all the projects you take on will necessarily be of your interest or be exclusively from a translation field you wanted to “specialize” in (such as literary translation, for example). 

• You have to be willing to, like, and even thrive when working under pressure, since you’ll always have deadlines and you’ll always be racing against the clock.   

• It’s a rough business when you’re getting started because you have to build your reputation from scratch. You may not have a lot of clients or might not be getting a lot of projects at first, so it might be a good idea to work in an agency in the beginning and slowly start building your client base from there before actually deciding to work exclusively as a freelancer. 

• It's better when the languages you translate to and from are “uncommon” (i.e. not English/Spanish, for instance), because it means you have less competition since there aren’t many people in your town, city, or even in the field, who have your particular set of language abilities. Less competition increases the demand, so you’ll be able to charge more for your work.

 * * *

Like any profession, being a translator has its pros and cons.

It’s a very hard, demanding and time-consuming job that requires a lot of sacrifices and compromise, and you won’t have the financial stability a 9 to 5 job would give you. On the other hand, it has benefits like being independent, choosing your working hours, being your own boss and setting your own rates.

At the end of the day, it’s important that you really know yourself, since it’s up to you to recognize whether or not you possess, are willing to and/or would be able to develop the qualities needed for the job.

If you decide you do and that you’re okay with everything that comes with the package, the cons will be easier to bear knowing putting up with them will almost always pay-off in the long-term in a profession you can actually make a decent (read: pretty damn good) living out of it.

Pamela V.