Steve Harris
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        Here are some comments from December 1998:
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        The standard piece of advice for aspiring translators (at least, it's the standard for me) is that finding a suitable subject matter specialty is at least as important as learning the foreign language. Most people who think that they might like translating as an occupation fail to realize that their clients will be paying them to translate specific documents, and this will require the translator to know something (often a lot) about a specific area of human endeavor.
        Are you very knowledgeable about a certain area of science or technology? A branch of industry? Financial business? Law? If not, you will probably have a hard time getting much work.
        Also, unless you are a phenomenal language learner, I doubt that you can learn enough Japanese by self-study to become a professional translator. It's a damn hard language for English speakers (and vice versa). Assuming that you have at least one of the aforementioned subject areas lined up, I would advise you to spend a few years in Japan, studying the language from professional teachers and acquiring familiarity with the culture.
        Once you have satisfied these requirements, we can begin discussing how to find clients. Good luck!
        Jon Johanning
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        In many ways anime/manga/game translations are even more challenging than technical material due to the often-esoteric subject matter and abundant use of colloquialisms. I was raised on a steady diet of Japanese anime myself (go ahead, ask me anything about Gundam :), but I realized how "blind" a translator of pop-culture materials is when I first sat down to do an actual translation of the text of a video game a year or so ago. There simply aren't any reliable study guides or dictionaries available for up-to-the-minute slang and "street talk." It's a "you know it or you don't" sort of thing, and there's no way around the fact that living in Japan is the best way to pick up that knowledge.
        Matthew Alt
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        > I think that most people outside the field seriously
        > underestimate the level of language skill needed
        > for translation.
        That's funny: I've noticed that many people in the field seriously underestimate the level of language skill needed for translation.
        Ryan Ginstrom
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        I don't know any other translator who said they started out wanting to be a translator. Not that there aren't people who do become a translator because it was a long-time goal. But in the case for Japanese, I think it takes at least five to six years of relevant experience and training (learning) to become proficient at any level of translation above the very very low value-added end. I graduated from one of the major Japanese national universities with a major in economics, did all my course work in Japanese, and it's only been in the past four years or so that I have felt comfortable enough to call myself a 'translator'. For Japanese, anyway, it just takes a lot of committment and dedication to set your sights that far ahead - which is why most JPN-ENG translators sort of fall into the field.
        I also never really set out to be a translator - my interest was economics and finance, and that's what I was doing when I sort of backed into translation. Of course, the intense field work from previous jobs was a major help. Other people have suggested it and implied it, I will say very directly - if you don't have a solid background in a particular field or hobby (a friend of mine makes a very good living in Europe translating from French to Japanese material on chess, an old hobby of ours from university days - he'd starve to death in the States), it is almost impossible to become a translator. Obviously, having a broad, general and diverse background of Japanese (being exposed to a variety of fields and experiences) will help you diversity across fields, which may help if demand in one particular field suddenly dries up - but ultimately, you need English knowledge of the work you're doing to be a good translator - knowing the Japanese is useless if you don't know how to make it sound natural in English. Just ask any other translators - even the best of them will struggle outside a field they feel comfortable in (myself included, and I'm not even one of the best of them).

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