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About meArchives for May, 2009
Breaking into the Industry
Yet another of those translation-related essays for the JET folks. I talk about the “CIR experience” below, but there are people with the language skills they need to get onto the low rungs of the translation ladder working Eikaiwa or JET language-teacher jobs too. Hope you find it interesting.
After spending their years as coordinators for international relations and picking up some translation skills along the way, some soon-to-be JET graduates think about making the move to the language services industry. There are plenty of people out there working as translators, but how did they get that work?
A quick look at the situation might make it seem like a Catch 22: employers are all looking for someone with relevant experience, but you can’t get that without finding an employer to take you on. This might come across particularly in specialized fields like financial or legal translation.
Not all is hopeless, though. There are ways to market yourself more effectively to potential employers, and there are things you can do right now to prepare yourself for the job search when the time comes. The first of these things is fairly obvious:
Get Good
You’ll have an easier time getting a job as a translator if you’re more talented in translation to begin with. There are four tasks you’ll want to pursue during your time as a CIR in this connection:
- Do jobs. This goes without saying, really. If your CIR assignments involve translation, focus on that work and polish your skills while you produce the texts your employer needs. If you aren’t doing much translation, look around for projects you could propose—a multilingual municipal website, signage for local tourist sites, and so on.
- Get feedback. This is something that’s not always easy to do, but ideally you want to show your work to native Japanese speakers, who will tell how you’re doing in staying faithful to the source material, and native speakers of your language, who will set you straight when what you write looks like it came from a robot instead of a human author.
- Network. If you’re involved in an online forum focused on your current job you’re doing this already, to some extent; take part in discussions on translation techniques to focus that networking. (This could be a good way to get the feedback you need, too.) Consider joining groups like JAT or SWET (see the links below), or at least attending their meetings when you can; you don’t need to be a member for that. Go to IJET or an ATA meeting. Industry people you’ve met in person are people who will remember you later when you come looking for a way into the industry.
- Pay attention. Read plenty of Japanese—to get better at it, but also to get more knowledgeable about what’s being written about. Read plenty in your own language, too. You need to develop an ear for appropriate, persuasive voices in the different fields where you may one day do work of your own.
Get Focused
Most established translators will tell you that the way to success in this business is not to do anything and everything that comes your way, but to specialize in an area you enjoy. (This should also be an area with real demand for translation services. Lots of people like manga, but the population that’s paying real money for translated manga isn’t large enough to support a lot of well-paid translators in that segment. In other words, don’t think of entering a field where your competition is a bunch of college students working for free.)
It can help to think of high-quality, high-paying translation as a donut. In the middle are all those people (I was one) who started off with language skills and not much else: Japanese majors, linguists, aimless bilinguals. On the outside of the donut are all the industries that make up the modern economy. It looks like this:
As the pure linguists develop an interest in some particular field, they learn more about it. The more field-specific knowledge they gain and pair with their language talent, the better they are at translating things related to that field, and the more money they can charge for it. The people on the outside, meanwhile—many high-paid translators fall in this category—begin with a career and experience and gain the language skills as they go on. In the end we all find ourselves in the donut. (Needless to say, we all continue learning on both sides of this equation throughout our careers; nobody starts off with perfect command of two languages, or encyclopedic knowledge of an industry.)
Get a Job
There are freelance and in-house translators, and the former will often claim that they are in the best position: they make more money, they pick their clients, they set their hours. The latter, meanwhile, will point out that they don’t have to do sales, write estimates, bill clients, withhold their own taxes, or pay for their own office space. There are pluses and minuses on both sides.
In the early part of your career, though, the pluses are overwhelmingly on the in-house translation side. It’s possible to start out by marketing your services directly to clients, but it’s far easier to let the company’s sales department do that job, while you focus on becoming a better translator.
The Japan Times carries classified ads on Mondays that usually contain at least a few translation job offers. The paper also has an online ads section, so take a look there, too. The Honyaku, SWET, and JAT mailing lists all see occasional job postings. Lurk on the lists (membership is only required for the last one) and respond to things that interest you.
Joining JAT, as mentioned above, is a way to meet translators; it’s also a way to create your very own member profile on the JAT website. I get a few emails each month asking me to sign up for freelance work or get in touch regarding a project. You can also set up a profile at Honyaku Home, which doesn’t cost a thing.
What about that Catch 22 described earlier? You need experience to get the job to get experience . . . But you can get some of that experience earlier. Freelance work is a way to get your feet wet, and can be done on the side in some cases. (All situations are different, of course; you may want to check with your employer to confirm that this is all right to do.) In addition to the above sites that let you put together an online profile, magazines like 通訳翻訳ジャーナル and websites like スペースアルク contain lots of information on translation agencies. The shotgun approach can work: send your resume to 50 agencies and do the trials that some of them send back. You can apply directly with companies like Simul International, too; see the Simul website for information on doing a trial and registering as a freelancer. Even my employer has an open invitation to people who want to do work for us.
When a company says something like “three years experience required,” it often isn’t a hard requirement. When applying for jobs, don’t forget to add a mental or equivalent to the end of phrases like those, and boldly send your application in just the same. The worst that can happen is a “No thank you” note or phone call, and you won’t have a job with that firm—but that’s exactly where you are right now. Be confident, too. You don’t have years of experience as a full-time translator, but CIR experience shows that you’ve functioned in a Japanese office setting, doing many of the tasks these employers are looking for.
Consider also casting your net a bit wider. You may want a job as a translator, but look at the ads for positions like “in-house editor” and “communications specialist” as well. These are jobs that can involve lots of brushing up other people’s translations, but once you’re on the inside of an organization doing this work you will have a shot at taking it on yourself. And because translation is a writing skill in the target language, producing copy for a company is a good way to get better at all forms of writing, including translation. Even executive secretaries do their fair share of translation work, and can find themselves transferred to divisions doing purer word work later on.
Get Informed
Below are some links to online information that you might find helpful:
Articles About Translation (Language Realm)
A good collection of essays on the language services industry. The “Translation as a Profession” series in particular is worth a look.
Getting Started as a Translator: Gleanings from Honyaku
A collection of posts from Honyaku mailing list threads going back to 1994. Very applicable to the field, even a decade or more later.
Translation as Vocation
A slideshow that accompanied a March 2007 presentation on ways to break into the field of J-E translation.
John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice
Not on translation per se, but it’s a worthwhile read for all people who want to write words for money.
Honyaku
This is a mailing list where translators facing problems in a job ask for help. There’s also occasional discussion of matters peripherally related to dealing with words on pages, so it can be good to lurk and learn. Job offers come down this pipeline from time to time, too.
The Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators
This group holds monthly meetings on topics you may find interesting. The mailing list is free to join for nonmembers; become a member for reduced admission to those meetings and a spot in the SWET directory.
The Japan Association of Translators
This group also holds monthly meetings in Tokyo, as well as other places in Japan and around the world from time to time. The profile you can create here as a member will attract messages from agencies looking to add people to their rosters. JAT organizes the annual IJET conferences (coming up next in Miyazaki in April 2010), which are great to attend. The organization was also crazy enough to elect me director as of May 2009.
The oldest words in English
Link of the day: An interesting look at language-related stuff comes from the University of Reading, where researchers have used powerful computers to figure out which words in the English language have stuck around unchanged for the longest time and to predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future. The rundown is that “word types evolve in the following order (from slowest to fastest): numerals, pro-nouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions.”
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1′, ‘2′ and ‘3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ’squeeze’, ‘guts’, ’stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. . . .
Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals.
(Side note: This press release is really poorly written. Par for the course for language researchers, huh?)
It would be interesting to see similar research done on Japanese. What little I remember of the Heian-era stuff I studied back in the day was very different from what gets spoken in the streets of Tokyo today, although I suppose the numbers have remained relatively constant, and using the same kanji over all those centuries has given the vocabulary an anchor of sorts to keep it more static.
(Via the Tomedes Blog.)
How it may have gone down
So I have decided to build more traffic for my site by writing things that outrage certain foreign Japan residents.
Speaking of outrage, how ’bout them 帰国支援金 payments to unemployed Nikkei to help them go back to Brazil, Peru, and so on? The New York Times has covered this dastardly attempt to give the boot to non-Japanese workers once their cheap labor is no longer needed, and even the local papers are looking at this as a case of cold-hearted government policy steamrolling constitutional rights (Mainichi, in Japanese and English).
There hasn’t been much coverage (in English, anyway) looking at the actual rules for this system as spelled out in this PDF file, though:
入管制度上の措置として、支援を受けた者は、当分の間、同様の身分に基づく在留資格による再入国を認めないこととする。
My quick and dirty translation: As an immigration control measure, recipients of this support will not be allowed to reenter Japan for some time with a status of residence based on the same situation [i.e. the visa exemption rule for people of Nikkei descent].
Discussion on the NBR mailing list has looked at the precise meaning of 当分の間 to decide whether it means “for a little while” or something closer to the “semipermanent” length of time mentioned in the Mainichi piece linked above. It’s hardly clear enough to be written into law as it stands, but the language here isn’t spelling out a cancellation of that Nikkei status forever.
In any case, I don’t see this situation as a clear-cut case of discrimination against those who aren’t pure Japanese. One idea for the discussions in Nagatachō/Kasumigaseki that may have led to all this:
“Hmm, the economy has gone to shit and Toyota is firing all its cheap labor. We’ve got a bunch of Brazilian citizens sitting around with no jobs.
“Who knows when those jobs are coming back . . . If they have no work in Japan, I suppose they might want to go back to their country of birth.”
“But they don’t have the money to do that! Is their only option to go homeless or turn to crime here in Japan?”
“No, nobody wants that. Let’s do a humanitarian thing and provide the money they need to get back home.”
“Sounds great—hey, but wait a minute. Won’t they just take the money and use it for a free trip back to Brazil, and then come right back? We’re back at the ‘out of work in Japan’ thing.”
“Hmm, you’re right. I guess we’ll have to add the proviso that they can’t come back.”
“Ever? They’ve learned some Japanese and may be valuable to Japanese employers again once the economy picks back up.”
“Well, all right, but let’s cancel their automatic status of residence based on Nikkei blood. If they’re coming back to Japan let’s make sure it’s on the strength of their employability, or something else that lets them obtain another SOR.”
“Sounds great.”
I have no idea about what exactly transpired, but it isn’t hard at all to think up the above as one possibility. The observers leaping to the “Japan is exploiting cheap labor and kicking people to the curb when they’re no longer needed” conclusion seem a little hot-tempered to me.
This is not to say that the government hasn’t been ham-fisted in its handling of things, of course. The newspaper coverage has been filled with quotes from local bureaucrats telling potential applicants for these funds that “no, you can’t ever come back, and neither can your children,” and the LDP’s Kawasaki Jirō, charming man that he is, has stated “I do not think that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society.” Any good intentions this program was founded on have been lost in the justified furor over these antagonistic positions. The constitutional angle mentioned in the Mainichi article is also worth examination: that the ministries spelling out these no-return rules don’t actually have the authority to make certain statuses of residence unavailable (something the Diet would have to do by amending the law) is definitely something to consider carefully.
But is it really so simple as “Oh, there goes that xenophobic Japan again?” Why is all this anger focused on a public program to give these people financial aid, rather than on the private companies that saw them as disposable factory automatons in the first place?
EDIT: The April 1 Nihon Keizai Shimbun (paper edition, no link; sorry) carried a small article on the 3/31 announcement of—wait for it—a set of policies to aid the Nikkei population, not just the “get out” money. In part (with my translation following):
厚生労働省は三十一日、失業して帰国を希望する日系外国人に対し、帰国旅費を支給する制度を四月から始めると発表した。日系人の在留資格で再入国しないことが条件 . . . 再就職を目指す日系人を対象に日本語能力などを高める研修制度も始める。
The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare announced yesterday a new system that from this month will provide travel expenses to unemployed Nikkei foreign nationals who want to return to their countries. Funds will be provided on condition that the recipients do not reenter Japan on the Nikkei-based status of residence . . . A training system will also be launched to improve the Japanese language and other skills of Nikkei residents who are seeking new employment in Japan.
This article makes it clear that the travel funds were one among several measures mentioned in the MHLW announcement (the parent page to that PDF I linked above) on things the government intends to do for the Nikkei population. I haven’t seen any English-language coverage of this set of steps being taken, though.
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