People regularly reach out and ask me for advice on how to break into the J-E translation field, and what to expect from it once you get in.

I'm going to share a thread of my thoughts and advice here in hopes that it helps more people reach an informed decision.

1. What skills do you need for J-E TL? Here's a handy thread where I elaborate on that topic.

There is no one-size-fits-all TL skillset. Interpretation jobs require different skills than text translation, and EN fluency is vital. https://twitter.com/dramata1/status/1237154234992414722?s=20

2. What qualifications do you need to get into the J-E media translation field?

Short answer: A language degree and JLPT N1 certification won't guarantee you a job, and plenty of my colleagues do fine without them, but you'll find a lot more doors open to you if you have them.

It's true that you can get a perfect score on the JLPT N1 and still not have the English language chops to cut it as a J-E translator.

But the JLPT N1 is still a vital measure of JP language comprehension, thus it's expected for you to pass it.

3. How do you get in once you check off boxes 1 and 2?

As with all media-related industries, the translation industry is very opaque and hard to access from the outside. You'll be sending a lot of cold emails to agencies and picking up piecework off proz dot com and other sites.

If you're lucky, some of those cold emails will get replies, and agencies will send you their own internal proficiency tests to measure if you fit their criteria.

At that point, whether you pass is up to both your own skill/creativity, and the reviewer's subjective grading.

There is no way around subjectivity in this field. I know multiple people who have been failed on basic TL tests not because their work was bad, but because the grader wasn't a native EN speaker and didn't understand their wording choices. That's just a roll of the dice, sorry.

I emphasize agency work here because positions "in-house" (that is, a full-time job within a game publishing company's office) typically require prior experience.

There is no such thing as an entry-level position in the TL field, nor are there any mentorships or apprenticeships.

This is all based on game work, of course. The anime subtitling field, as I understand it, is currently a mix of agency-based work for streaming services like Crunchyroll and Funimation, and publishers directly hiring freelancers for physical releases.

The manga translation field is all freelancers working directly for publishers. As is the case with agencies, they tend to issue tests and grade them with their own specific and subjective criteria. Gigs are usually billed on a per-book basis rather than per-moji.

4. Let's say you do get freelance agency work. What can you expect?

First off, most of the biggest agencies (Keywords, Lionbridge, Kinsha) that get the most work use their leverage to enforce binding, perpetual NDAs that prevent you from ever discussing your work in public.

Credit is unlikely in agency-based work. And even when you do get listed in a game's credits, sometimes the agency STILL enforces the NDA. (This actually happened to an editor friend. He got told to take a game off his Linkedin resume despite being in the credits for it!)

You can also expect big agencies to push unreasonable deadlines on you at every opportunity. Middle management loves to agree immediately to anything a company asks, for fear of losing out on future business. The result: Expecting 9 women to give birth to a baby in 1 month.

5. Pay varies WILDLY.

Every time I see a professional talk about making 8-10 yen per Japanese character (moji), I stare incredulously. With one minor exception, the best I've ever seen in the game field is 6 yen, and I've also seen it go as low as 1 yen per moji.

There are several factors that go into these pay disparities. Some text is genuinely harder and more time-consuming to work on than other text. Not all translation material is equal. And sometimes it's just the industry standard to pay lower for games for girls (otome games).

At a SEGA TL panel I once attended, they considered 4k/day work volume to be reasonable. I walked out of that questioning if I was being too sloppy doing 10k/day in my work, but I eventually realized that the text they worked on was more complicated and disjointed than mine.

What this means is that sometimes lower paying gigs are fine, if you can get more work done on them in the same time period vs. what a higher paying and more complicated gig would require.

The calculus will be different for every freelancer's speed, quality, and time management.

There are times when per-moji pay is inappropriate as well. You shouldn't bill per-moji on glossary text that requires extensive outside research, for example. That's where an hourly rate is more appropriate.

6. Job consistency is hard to come by.

Starting out, you're likely to get a handful of one-time gigs. Eventually after those gigs end, your work will dry up, and nothing else will be forthcoming for a while.

You should expect to go weeks or months without work. I had a long dry period as recently as last year.

You'll have to reach out to more agencies, or take work from piecework sites, or find other ways to supplement your income.

This is why I tell all translators starting out the same thing:

DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB until you know you have enough steady work lined up to keep you going for a long while.

There's no shame in translating part-time while working a day job. Plenty of us do it.

7. Is this career worth it?

That's a hard question with a lot of bullet points. The answer will be different for everyone, so consider these things.

• How much time and money and energy are you willing to invest into learning a second language?

• How confident are you in your English composition/grammar? Will you need to take classes to brush up on that too? (These are NOT skills that native English speakers are born knowing)

• If you live in the US: Are you willing to potentially move to the west coast US (super expensive) or Japan (also expensive + needs visa) to go where the in-house game translation jobs are?

And the big summary questions:

• Are you willing to invest a ton of time, energy, and resources into an unstable freelance career?

• Are you prepared to go years without steady employment?

• Can you accept doing work that you can never openly discuss in public?

Long story short: J-E media translation is a bit of a bumpy ride. But if you can get over all the hurdles, it's a genuinely fun and rewarding creative field.

To everyone following me who's still interested in getting in after reading this thread: Good luck and hang in there!!

Three ways:

1) Have a friend or personal teacher/mentor who critiques your work

2) Keep taking tests until you figure out what you're missing (they won't usually tell you)

3) Take low paying work with lower standards for getting in https://twitter.com/elibean4/status/1387258196151062530?s=20

That's a real segment of the industry and it's not a fun place to be in (they do things like ask you to "be your own editor"...), but often newer translators don't have other employment options.

The best you can do there is hone your skill and keep looking for better options.

God, this is too true.

You also don't get corporate health care as a freelancer, and you have to do your own self-employment taxes.

In short, it's not a worker-friendly industry. Be ready for that. https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1387274137786224645?s=20