Comments | twissie: What Do You Do For A Living?

twissie

What Do You Do For A Living?

Feb 01, 2016 21:31

I quit my 9-5 as a translation line manager last summer. I decided to start up my own translation business, and I have worked as a freelance translator ever since. I translate from English to Norwegian, my subject fields of choice are IT, software, hardware, website content, and support articles ( Read more... )

freelancing, work, all about me

Comments 8

illusoire February 1 2016, 23:10:01 UTC

I'm glad that freelancing has been working out well for you, even though it can be difficult to find jobs in your field. It's good that you'll be able to keep it up while you're in Japan! I'd like to get into translating eventually, I think, if I can get my Japanese up to scratch - I have a few friends here doing Japanese - English translation work.

twissie February 8 2016, 23:08:06 UTC

It's not necessarily difficult to find jobs within IT and software, it's just the agencies keep offering me other things because I've been delivering good translations, and they need people who deliver a consistent quality. I don't really mind being a jack of all trades, but it's always better to specialize, so I try to focus on IT whenever possible :P

Yeees, I'd love to be able to offer Japanese > Norwegian translations at some point. I'm thinking I should join a language class once I'm in Japan, we'll see how it all pans out :)

touchofgr3y February 2 2016, 01:33:45 UTC

I wish I were able to work at home! I'd probably be more comfortable with the agency too - doing your own business seems so overwhelming!

twissie February 8 2016, 23:08:57 UTC

Well I am doing my own business, but I am freelancing for agencies :) I used to be employed at an agency, though, and while the security was nice, it wasn't worth the stress and the overtime.

tigersinacage February 2 2016, 03:38:47 UTC

I wish I was multilingual! I speak a bit of Spanish and some French, but definitely not enough to do anything with.

It is also really cool that you've built your own business! It seems like you get more flexibility and the ability to work on a variety of projects.

twissie February 8 2016, 23:10:11 UTC

It's weird, growing up, I never really thought of it as something I could make money off of. I was just happy I knew enough English to be able to read Harry Potter in its original language, you know? XD It's crazy the things we take for granted some times.

Thanks! It's a little unreal to me, actually. It's all worked out a lot better than expected.

frandroid February 2 2016, 03:59:12 UTC

I used to freelance translate, from French to English. I have absolutely no education in translation, but I grew up in French, and I've been living in English for close to 20 years, and I've always been good with languages, so whatever. Some freelance editing agency guy who paid me $20/hr once to do photocopies for him asked me if I could translate, I said I could try, and he kept paying me $20/hr to do translation. Hahaha. But I started to learn how to do this work, and at some point even bought me a licence for SDT Trados! He kept fucking up so he lost some good contracts. A few years later I ended up in a co-working space where people kept asking me if I knew translators because I speak French, so I decided to give it another stab, listing myself at 25 cents a word this time :] I eventually settled on freetm.com as my tool of choice, as most of my clients weren't sophisticated, e.g. wouldn't hire a proofer ( ... )

twissie February 8 2016, 23:16:49 UTC

Oh nice, I didn't know that! 25 cents per word is actually very nice! Looking at average rates French > English the rates are now 12 cents!

I prefer SDL Trados Studio 2015 (before that I was absolutely sure I would never switch from SDLX, but Studio won me over after a while). It's the tool I've been trained in, and feel most comfortable working with. I still work a lot in Idiom as well, even though it's an outdated tool :P

I have a Bachelor's degree in Japanese, but signed up for two classes on translation as well (it seemed interesting, and I needed some linguistic related subjects to complete my Bachelor's), though both classes did Norwegian > English instead of English > Norwegian. It focused on translation theory and not at all on tools or the translation industry. I learnt a lot from it that I definitely had use for later on when I started as a trainee at my old office (worked my way up to translation line manager before I quit :P).