Jon Johanning
        ________________________________________
        When I started translation I thought I would learn a lot about Japanese, which I did, but I also ended up learning as much or more about English, which I didn't expect.
 
        Any time spent now mastering good writing skills will be well worth your while. For example, can you distinguish between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, and do you know when to use which? Attention to such detail is one of the things that distinguish professional caliber translations.
 
        Dan Kanagy
        ________________________________________
        From April 1999:
        ________________________________________
        I just struck me that many of the translators that I have met have asked me "What did you do before." The assumption seems to be that whatever I did before has some relevance to what I translate. I have also seen only one person who actually graduated from a school with a translation related degree.
        This would seem to indicate that most translators start off somewhere else and then sort of fall into translation.
        Paul Flint
        ________________________________________
        If anyone sends me a resume seeking work, I almost always ask a question like "What did you do before?" (unless they answered it in the resume, of course). I don't think most people fall into translation from somewhere else, but I am interested in knowing what fields of human knowledge the person is familar with outside of the skill of translation. There are a lot of people who are native English speakers, who have learned Japanese as a second language, and who can translate superbly, but who unfortunately know absolutely nothing about anything outside English grammar and Japanese 4-character kanji sayings. That's great if you are translating a letter home to Mom, but if the job at hand is a technical piece, I want to know what sort of technical background a translator has before farming out the job.
        Edward Lipsett
        ________________________________________
        There might be generalists who argue that they can and must translate everything. I would go along with the "must" part in some markets, but seriously doubt the "can" part in many cases. That position is backed up by questions asked on this list. It is much easier to know how badly you are doing in field B when you have a field A, in which you do good work, to use as a quality/pain benchmark. Without a field A, everything is (or should be) painfully difficult, and this sometimes leads to misconceptions about quality and qualifications.
        Bill Lise
        ________________________________________
        We all did something else before we became translators. And if we are lucky, the stuff we are translating relates to our non-translation interests, in which case there is a likelihood we may have done some of that before or while becoming translators.
        Fred Uleman
        ________________________________________
        I have an "academic translation related degree", but without about 6 years practice within the patent department of a chemical maker, I think, I could not call myself a translator.
        Anyway there are a lot of befores, and it is good if one can make use of them...
        Uwe Hirayama
        ________________________________________
        My pseudo-thesis (the exact nature of the work defies explication) project was on "Career Paths for Translators" and done back in 1997 for my M.A. in Japanese Business Communication at Monash University. JAT and Honyaku people greatly assisted in performing the research for this paper. It was a small sample (under 100) of JAT members and Honyaku people.
        Select quotes....
        "In terms of age, in-house translators tend to be younger than translators in other categories [the two other categories being "freelance"and "self-employed/self-incorporated"], and this could indicate that these translators are in the beginning stages of their careers. A high percentage of in-house translators responded that they are planning to work exclusively on a freelance or self-employed basis in the future. Given that many have less than 10 years' experience, this could indicate that in-house translation is regarded as a career starting point by many translators......."

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] 下一页